Foreign help vowed in tax evasion Crackdown

It will soon get a lot harder to use overseas accounts to hide income and assets from the Internal Revenue Services.

More than 77.000 foreign banks, investment funds and other financial institutions have agreed to share information about U.S. account holders wit the the IRS as part of a crackdown on offshore evasion, the Treasury Department announced yesterday. 

The list includes Russian financial institutions. Russian banks had to apply directly to the IRS because the United States broke off negotiations with the Russian governments over an information-sharing agreement because of Russia's actions in the Ukraine.

Nearly 70 countries have agreed to share information from their banks as part of a U.S. law that targets Americans hiding assets overseas. Participating countries include the world's financial giants, as well as many places where Americans have traditionally hidden assets, including Switzerland, the Cayman Islands and the Bahamas.

Starting in March 2015. these financial institutions have agreed to supply the IRS with names, account numbers and balances for accounts controlled by U.S. taxpayers.

Under the law, foreign banks that don't agree to share information with the IRS face steep penalties when doing business in the United States.

The law requires American banks to withhold 30 percent of certain payments to foreign banks that don't participate in the program- a significant price for access to the world’s largest economy.

The 2010 law is known as FATCA, which stands for the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act. It was designed to encourage- some say force- foreign financial institutions to share information about U.S. account holders with the IRS, making it more difficult for Americans to use overseas accounts to evade U.S. taxes.