Word: accountants
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Birkenfeld is caught up in the latest in a series of efforts by the feds to crack down on wealthy tax cheats and the bankers, accountants and lawyers who help - and in fact, often convince - them to set up offshore accounts not properly reported to the IRS. (It is legal to have an offshore account; hiding it is the no-no.) On Thursday the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations will hold a hearing on how banks in offshore tax havens may be helping Americans evade taxes. The hearing adds momentum to efforts already under...
...niche businesses. As a private banker at UBS, Birkenfeld traveled from his home in Switzerland to the U.S. to court ultra-wealthy American clients at tennis tournaments and art fairs. He would explain, among other things, how to buy jewels and artwork using funds from their secret Swiss bank accounts while they were overseas. Once, at the request of a client, he bought diamonds with money from an offshore account and smuggled them into the States in a toothpaste tube...
...their own bit of skulduggery: they bought records stolen by a former employee of the Liechtenstein bank LGT Group, owned by that Alpine nation's royal family. Other tax authorities piled on, including the IRS. In February, the IRS said it was investigating more than 100 Americans with bank accounts in Liechtenstein, a 15-mile-long country sandwiched between Switzerland and Austria, where financial services account for 30% of the economy, thanks to some of the world's tightest bank-secrecy laws. "It certainly has gotten a lot of people energized," says Michael McIntyre, a professor...
...best way to get to the bottom line is to look at long-term studies where we randomize people to a high-fat/low-carb diet or to a low-fat/high-carb diet and follow them for at least a year or more. That kind of study takes into account the possibility that one kind of diet provides more satiety; so, over the long run you would see more weight loss on that diet. But those studies - half a dozen or more have been done - show quite clearly that the percentage of calories from fat has very little effect on long...
...confirms much of Kurtz's account, but stresses that the situation was far from clear-cut when agents arrived on the scene. "He had a working microbiology lab in his home. He did not have an art exhibit in his home. We also had a dead body," says Maureen Dempsey, spokesperson for the Buffalo field office of the FBI. "We didn't know what was in there. That's why we had to cordon off the house." The bacteria that Kurtz had in his house had been used in the past to simulate dangerous bacteria for research purposes - which...