A government lawsuit Thursday seeks the identities of tens of thousands of possible US tax cheats who hid billions of dollars in assets at the Swiss-based bank UBS AG. A defiant Swiss president pledged to maintain his country's bank secrecy laws. In the suit filed in Miami, the Obama administration wants UBS to turn over information on as many as 52,000 US customers who concealed their accounts from the US government in violation of tax laws. “At a time when millions of Americans are losing their jobs, their homes, and their health care, it is appalling that more than 50,000 of the wealthiest among us have actively sought to evade their civil and legal duty to pay taxes,” the acting assistant attorney general, John DiCicco, said in a statement. A deal announced Wednesday provides access to about 250 to 300 UBS customers who used Swiss bank secrecy laws to hide assets. To avoid prosecution, UBS agreed to pay $780 million. The bank's chairman, Peter Kurer, said UBS accepted “full responsibility” for helping its US clients conceal assets from the Internal Revenue Service. On Wednesday, the government claimed there were close to 20,000 US clients who hid assets through the UBS program. A day later, the number had climbed to 52,000. US officials offered no immediate explanation for the revised estimate. Hours before the new suit, Switzerland's president, Hans-Rudolf Merz, said his country will not relent in defending its treasured tradition of confidential bank accounts. “Banking secrecy, ladies and gentlemen, remains intact,” Merz told reporters. Merz said Swiss authorities handed over the files on the 250 to 300 American clients of who are suspected of tax fraud. But US officials want much more. According to Thursday's filing, the thousands of accounts held $14.8 billion in assets in the past decade. Merz, UBS and Switzerland's financial regulator insist that Thursday's handover was not a retreat from the principle of banking secrecy because it involved only a small number of files linked to tax fraud - and not tax evasion. According to US officials, an acquisition in 2000 of a US company brought UBS a host of new American clients. The bank then set about to evade new reporting requirements for those clients. To do so, UBS executives helped US taxpayers open new accounts in the names of sham entities. The clients, in turn, filed false tax returns that omitted the income they earned in their Swiss accounts, according to the court papers. Experts said the decision to bypass the courts and give up customers before exhausting all legal options seriously endangers a pillar of the banking industry that helped transform Switzerland into one of the world's richest countries.
