Date: 4/26/2018
The government is appealing a September 2017 ruling from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania that Arthur Bedrosian, the CEO of Lannett Co. Inc., was entitled to a refund of the FBAR penalty he paid for not disclosing a $2 million UBS account.
“I liked the district court's opinion because it was the first court that was willing to draw a line between recklessness and negligence,” Zhanna A. Ziering, a tax member at Caplin & Drysdale, Chartered in New York, told Bloomberg Tax. Ziering called the government's appeal a “risk” because it has so far won all the FBAR cases at the circuit court level and the Bedrosian case is very “fact-specific.”
. . .
No Excuse or Defense
. . .
“Based on the government's brief, the government is trying to get the circuit court to clearly adopt a move from ‘willfulness’ into ‘recklessness’,” Ziering said. “If the court agrees, a taxpayer's intent will become irrelevant.”
For the full article, please visit Bloomberg BNA’s website (subscription required).
Excerpt taken from the article “Pharma CEO ‘Reckless’ in Not Disclosing Swiss Account: Government” by Matthew Beddingfield for Bloomberg BNA.
