This NY Times article interviews Jerome Schneider, who for the past 20 years or so made a fortune setting up offshore banks and phony investments in tax havens such as the Cayman Islands, Grenada, Montserratt, Vanuatu, the Cook Islands, and the Pacific Island of Nauru to assist wealthy U.S. citizens in avoiding income taxes.
His handbook, “The Complete Guide to Offshore Money Havens,” became quite popular among wealthy folks who are willing to take such risks. The 2000 edition of the book even carried an endorsement from Louisiana Republican Representative Billy Tauzin, who also spoke at a conferences in which Mr. Schneider promoted his tax evasion schemes.
In at least the understatement of the month, a spokesman for Mr. Tauzin conceded that Mr. Tauzin’s involvement with Mr. Schneider was “a stupid mistake.”
Well, the gig is up for Mr. Schneider, who pled guilty in February to conspiring to help his clients evade the tax laws. And those who invested with Mr. Schneider just might receive an invitation of sorts soon:
Mr. Schneider, who pleaded guilty in February to conspiring to help his clients evade the tax laws, said that he expected “every single one” of his clients to be prosecuted or sued for the taxes they evaded. He said clients sought to evade taxes on incomes ranging from $100,000 to $40 million, though most were from a third to half a million dollars.
Some of those who benefitted from Mr. Schneider’s schemes could prove to be fairly interesting:
[Mr. Schnieder] said that all his clients had two things in common – they were rich and they wanted to escape taxes.
Most of the nation’s major accounting firms worked with one or another of his clients, he said, and he named two law firms that he said were central to his business.
He said one prominent actress sent money to the United International Bank in Nauru, which he said he created. He said the actress paid $50,000 for a legal opinion asserting that the arrangement was legal.
Mr. Schneider also said that in 1988 he arranged for a prominent motivation coach to place $250,000 in an offshore bank without reporting the money to the I.R.S.
In addition, Mr. Schneider said that a billionaire media businessman, one of several clients who he said were on the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans, sent $40 million to a sham bank in Nauru to pay for a nut-processing company in 1994.
What is perhaps most amazing about Mr. Schneider’s scheme is how long it took federal authorities to investigate Mr. Schneider, even after he plopped the basis for such an investigation in their lap:
The Senate Permanent Investigations subcommittee called Mr. Schneider as a witness in 1983 hearings on offshore tax evasion, and two years later the Comptroller of the Currency warned American banks about dealing with some of the offshore banks Mr. Schneider created.
Mr. Schneider said his undoing began the day more than a decade ago when he asked Jack Blum, a former United States Senate investigator, to speak at one of his offshore seminars. Mr. Blum, who specializes in exposing international financial crimes, wrote a letter to the Justice Department that prompted the investigation that led to Mr. Schneider’s guilty plea.
Mr. Blum said, “That Schneider could operate openly for years, buying ads in the Wall Street Journal and the American Airlines flight magazine, shows the utter failure of tax law enforcement.” He said law enforcement had known about Mr. Schneider for years, but failed to act.
The I.R.S., in court papers, said it began investigating Mr. Schneider in 1997, 14 years after his Senate testimony, because of the letter from Mr. Blum. It took five more years to obtain an indictment.
Oh well, better late than never. Read the entire article.