US ambassador ‘compartmentalises’ banking woes

Getting tough with Swiss banks, angering American expats in Switzerland – two negative issues the United States ambassador to Switzerland is able to spin positively. Looking back on her first year in the job, Suzan G. (Suzi) LeVine focuses on cooperation between the two countries and the good things to come.

“We’ve worked very hard to do two things this past year,” she says during an interview at swissinfo.ch. “Help people focus on the basis of our relationship being great, and being about our economic ties and economic growth, and having a great flow-in of American tourists coming to Switzerland and vice versa . . . and compartmentalising the banking situation. And two is, helping people quantify the situation.”

Banking woes

Seated at a microphone in one of the swissinfo studios, LeVine chooses her words carefully. The topic: US citizens and banking. A multitude of Swiss banks have paid or are facing fines for helping US citizens evade taxes. “Let me give you some numbers here,” says the ambassador.

The Department of Justice has issued approximately 167 billion dollars in fines to banks, she says. Of that, “only 3% have been to Swiss banks. Eighty-five percent have been to American banks.” LeVine clarifies: “This is about American taxpayers. This isn’t actually about Switzerland.”

But American expats in Switzerland see the US government’s search for tax cheats in a different light. Increasing numbers of them have been giving up their US citizenship due to hardships caused by the new FATCA tax reporting requirements for US citizens abroad. Banks, now required to submit extensive information to the US government about their US clients, are closing their doors to American citizens.

Levine counters that helping American citizens in Switzerland is one of the US embassy’s top priorities. “We’ve been doing a lot to have a dialogue with the Swiss Bankers Association and with major banking institutions here to look at what are some of the ways to alleviate some of the stressors within the banking experience for US-related persons,” she says. “And there are some banks that are coming forward and saying ‘We take Americans!’ And so I think that we’ve made some traction on that. Hopefully more this coming year.

swissinfo.ch

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