IRS has claimed billions in tax revenue from offshore accounts in recent years.

Over the years, the US has ratcheted up its global approach to taxation, including the 2010 law known as the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or FATCA. It requires financial institutions worldwide to track US account holders and provide information to the government.<br><br>ProPublica compared the years right before FATCA was implemented to 2020 (the most recent year for which data was available) and found dramatic changes in several countries. The IRS went from collecting virtually nothing from Switzerland to more than $1 billion in 2020. In 2011, the agency collected only about $900,000 from Singapore, but $538 million in 2020.<br><br>More than $10 billion flowed in from the Cayman Islands in 2020, compared with $68 million in 2011. The holding company for the wealth of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway — which ProPublica previously reported uses an estimated $27 billion in offshore tax benefits — is located there.<br><br>From Bermuda, the IRS collected $385 million in 2011. By 2020, that number had grown to $1.2 billion.<br><br>The money being collected by the IRS includes billions of dollars that flowed out of Bermuda-based companies and into the US Treasury as part of settlements for taxes due from earlier years. Many of the island’s companies had failed to comply with FATCA, putting themselves at risk of severe retaliation from the US. In 2018, the government and several businesses struck a deal that included paying billions to the IRS as part of an amnesty program.