In a ruling issued Oct. 30, U.S. District Judge Adalberto Jordan ordered MasterCard and American Express to turn over account holder records in Antigua, The Bahamas and the Cayman Islands. <\/P><\/p>\n
The IRS brought the case in Miami because Caribbean credit card accounts clear through Miami subsidiaries of the two companies. <\/P><\/p>\n
The offshore accounts belong largely to middle- and upper-middle class individuals whose goal is to shelter income from taxation. Demand for these accounts has increased in the past decade, as investors earn large profits on stock portfolios. <\/P><\/p>\n
Typically, U.S. citizens open these accounts in Caribbean tax havens and register deposits in an offshore bank. The bank then provides the client with a credit card that draws on the account. In many cases, offshore banks reinvest the assets in the United States, but the American owner pays no taxes on these investments. <\/P><\/p>\n
If the IRS proves U.S. citizens used offshore accounts to avoid taxes, the court’s ruling could lead to thousands of criminal charges and fines totaling millions of dollars. <\/P><\/p>\n
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include Fortune 500 companies and major government agencies – rely on Stratfor’s geopolitical analysis and forecasts to enable them to manage risk and to anticipate political, economic and security issues vital to their interests. <\/P><\/p>\n
Armed with Stratfor’s strategic intelligence, decision-makers are better able to diminish their risk, increase their opportunities, protect their assets and compete in the market. For a complete description of our service, see our corporate pages on your Bloomberg terminal by searching for Stratfor under the ticker symbol ‘SFOR’. <\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A Miami court authorised the Internal Revenue Service to examine banking records of tens of thousands of U.S. citizens with offshore accounts in the Caribbean.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":{"facebook_10223285771444175_51037792744":""},"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-244577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-headlines"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244577"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244577\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}