9 thoughts on “The Swiss TaxMan tougher than the IRS!”

1. Having worked for almost 2 decades as an IT contractor mostly in Zürich I have often heard my colleagues who lived in Canton Zürich complain about the Canton’s tax office.  Zürich is known as being exceptionally anal when it comes to allowing deductions and in collecting.  Zürich also recently had a referendum and abolished its old fixed rate tax (Pauschal) agreement system for rich people because the socialists whipped up class envy. See also Tina Turner who has a house in Zürich is rarely mentioned as a renounced US person.

   In Switzerland the taxing authority is in the Canton and Federal taxes are calculated based on the income you claim in the Canton.  This means that each Canton has its own tax authority and there are major differences between Canton just in which deductions are allowed let alone tax rates.  Some Cantons have tax rates less than half the rate of others and those Cantons with low rates are far more prosperous than the ones with high rates.  The high tax-rate Cantons are generally much more socialist and economically stagnant.  It really illustrates how important tax-competition is for our freedom.

2. This sort of screwup could happen in any country.

3. @ConfederateH

   Interesting, I did not know that Tina Turner renounced her citizenship. As far as I can tell, the page you cite merely lists Americans living in Switzerland. Where did you hear about this?

4. @Wellington,  I was thinking about Zürich and I know that Turner has a fancy villa overlooking lake Zürich (she’s made a fortune on Franc appreciation alone).  So I started googling.  Its not on her wiki page but there’s little references all over.  Here is another site that mentions her expatriation:

   http://www.astro.com/astro-databank/Turner,_Tina

   Lifestyle : Home : Expatriate (U.S. to Germany and Switzerland)
   

5. Wikipedia (along with the fifty million sites that scrape Wikipedia) uses the term “expatriate” in the normal modern English sense of “living abroad”, rather than the outdated sense of “giving up citizenship”. There’s a separate category for people who are confirmed to have given up U.S. citizenship:

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:People_who_lost_United_States_citizenship

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_former_United_States_citizens_who_relinquished_their_nationality

   For what it’s worth (not much), there’s no Bullock (her maiden name) listed in the Federal Register, and the only Turners are Susan Claire, Walter Vernon, and James Allen. Maybe she renounced before 1997. If she was in the GAO list in 1995 it probably would have been reported (that’s how the media found out about Michael Dingman and Yehudi Menuhin).

6. @Eric:  I can’t find anything thing in google about Turner “renouncing”.  I guess you are correct, thanks for the correction.

7. Here’s an interesting tid-bit:

   http://worldradio.ch/wrs/news/switzerland/bank-clients-bite-back-with-lawsuit.shtml?31563

   HSBC released the names of 1100 Swiss employees to the IRS as potential accomplices to US tax evasion.  Of the 1100 only 17 had anything to do directly with US clients, but now every employee of HSBC Switzerland (and possibly other countries) has to worry about whether the IRS, DOJ or Interpol could have them arrested.

   My Cantonal bank wealth advisor says he will never go to America again because he just doesn’t know.  Until recently he had several American clients but in the last year the bank made everyone of them close their accounts.  He told me that if I hadn’t renounced he would have had to close my account too.  But now HSBC employees in IT and the back office have to worry about whether they are on an IRS “detain” list.

8. Phil Hodgen’s advice to Swiss Bankers was to stay out of the US.  This was when one of them had a layover in the US on his way to the Caribbean:

   This is not legal advice, and I am not your lawyer.  But:

   • Do not travel to the United States.  Ever.
   • If you are flying to South America from Europe, do not change planes in the United States.  Ever.

9. Petros, the problem is that you don’t have to be a “banker” to work for a bank.  Mr Hodgen should expand his warning to “any current or past Swiss bank employees”.