Streamlined Disclosure Program Won’t Continue Indefinitely

Streamlined Disclosure Program Won’t Continue Indefinitely

A streamlined version of the Offshore Voluntary Disclosure Program, designed to bring taxpayers with unreported assets overseas into tax compliance, will end after the IRS determines there’s no way a taxpayer who wanted to participate couldn’t have heard about the process, Commissioner John Koskinen said.

“At some point, we will have assumed that people have had enough notice that they should have become voluntarily compliant,” Koskinen said Dec. 17 at the George Washington University Law conference on international taxation. “At that point—after some period of time and you’re not compliant—it will be assumed that logically you are purposely not compliant.”

The Internal Revenue Service doesn’t yet have a plan for when it will end the program, Koskinen said. About 20,000 taxpayers have disclosed accounts through a streamlined filing program since June 2014, according to data from the IRS.