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ezpace
04-12-2006, 09:25 AM
Court says IRS can ask PayPal for data on offshore accounts



WASHINGTON (AP) - The Internal Revenue Service won approval from a federal court to ask PayPal, which has operations in the Omaha area, to turn over information about people who might be evading taxes by hiding income in other countries, officials said Tuesday.

A federal court in San Jose, Calif., gave the IRS permission to ask PayPal - a company that enables online money transfers - for account information for American taxpayers who have bank accounts, credit cards or debit cards issued by financial institutions in more than 30 countries reputed to be tax havens.

PayPal spokeswoman Amanda Pires said the company had just received the summons.

"We're still evaluating our options," she said. "The privacy of our customers' information is something we take really seriously."

PayPal enables individuals and businesses around the globe to send and receive money online. In 2005, users moved $27.5 billion through the money transmitter. The company, owned by eBay, has 100 million account holders globally.

The request for information is an outgrowth of an IRS effort, begun several years ago, to trace money that American taxpayers hold offshore to avoid paying taxes. The IRS said many of those taxpayers access their money through credit and debit cards. The tax collectors have already obtained information from some credit card companies, merchants and payment processors.

"PayPal is another one of the mechanisms by which money stashed overseas might be spent," Eileen O'Connor, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department Tax Division, told reporters.

In some cases, the IRS obtained credit card numbers but could not identify the cardholder. The IRS said PayPal might be able to lead the tax agency to those individuals.

The IRS also hopes PayPal can help them identify currently unknown taxpayers' and their payment cards, as well as offshore bank accounts, that might be evidence of tax evasion.

The request covers transactions occurring from 1999 through 2004.

A 2003 amnesty program netted $170 million in taxes and penalties from income hidden offshore. More than 1,300 taxpayers avoided criminal prosecution by coming forward and revealing the person or company that marketed the offshore arrangement.

classhandicapper
04-12-2006, 01:28 PM
Neteller will probably be next.

kenwoodallpromos
04-12-2006, 01:58 PM
Your post says per capita $27,000 to $150,000. This is not small time bettors are individual comsumers. These are high-level business execs who are hiding tens of thousand of unreported income so the lower and middle class have to get their taxes raised to make up for the loss, and theswe are white collar criminals.
Any of you running $10,000 + per year through PayPal?

kingfin66
04-12-2006, 02:04 PM
1. PayPal has not allowed transfers to offshore books for several years.

2. Neteller, if memory serves me correctly, is a UK-based company.

3. People who hide these large amounts of income offshore are doing something in violation of the law. Should they be protected. Or this a "privacy" thing that parallels the Justice Department subpoening info from Google?

AQUEBUCKS
04-12-2006, 06:35 PM
Hey guys, let's not confuse income with wagering capital. I'm sure a bunch of this offshore money has already been taxed and a bunch of it lost in wagering. What might pose a future issue are rebate returns-but that's another discussion.

classhandicapper
04-12-2006, 06:38 PM
Neteller is UK based, but there's nothing stopping the US government from asking for the information or from pressuring US financial institutions and other businesses to not do business with Neteller - which in turn could lead to the information being disclosed. Almost the entire US poker world uses Neteller to fund/withdraw from their poker accounts. I think a lot of this kind of stuff is an attempt to get at the online gaming revenue that the government doesn't get a piece of.

highnote
04-14-2006, 02:19 PM
I think a lot of this kind of stuff is an attempt to get at the online gaming revenue that the government doesn't get a piece of.

If the U.S. would just legalize this stuff a lot of the problems would be solved. Do you really want your tax money to be used to fund government agencies so that they can go looking for people who have offshore betting accounts? The people with offshore betting accounts are probably losing more money betting than they are making, so don't owe taxes anyway.

Think of all the money that would be saved if internet gambling was legalized. We'd save money on bureaucrats and we'd raise tax money on gambling winnings. It would be a double-bonus. Plus the additional tax money raised could be used to fund these bureaucratic programs.

skate
04-14-2006, 03:34 PM
Swety;


you say;
"""If the U.S. would just legalize this stuff a lot of the problems would be solved."""

well they do" legalize this stuff". regardlise of who wins , the player or the book is not the point, but rather, the point is that the money is leaving the country.
as a mater of fact "the player 's lose" is of more concern than if the player won.

skater

__________________

hurrikane
04-16-2006, 08:47 AM
Your post says per capita $27,000 to $150,000. This is not small time bettors are individual comsumers. These are high-level business execs who are hiding tens of thousand of unreported income so the lower and middle class have to get their taxes raised to make up for the loss, and theswe are white collar criminals.
Any of you running $10,000 + per year through PayPal?

27.5 billion. 100 million member. that's 275.00 a year avg. Most of their people are small time. 50 bucks here or there.
A majority of it is for ebay transactions which is why the company was started.

10k a year, that's what...8-900 a month. This is not what I would call high level business execs holding thousands of unreported income.