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Moshe Asher: We have lists with names of many thousands of Israelis with bank accounts with significant balances.
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Tax Authority Director General Moshe Asher again issued a warning to Israelis who hold undeclared assets abroad: “We are ‘shifting gears’ in our work methodology in our fight against black capital. Until now, we handled isolated requests for Israeli-held foreign accounts, but it was not effective. From now on, we are shifting to a mode of exchanging lists. We already received lists with names of many thousands of Israelis who have bank accounts with significant balances, primarily in Europe, and we will deal with them in the near future, ” Asher said today at the annual conference of the Institute of Certified Public Accountants in Eilat, “There is tens of billions of dollars’ worth of Israeli black capital abroad.”
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Asher said that the new lists were put to work in the Tax Authority’s intelligence and investigation unit. “In the coming months, you will receive more significant results about a great number of Israelis. Thousands. We will check them all. We will check where the money in their accounts is from, whether they have a declaration of assets, where the interest from the money is, where they have stock portfolios; we will check everything, ” he said.
The Tax Authority director explained that in order to successfully fight black capital, and for the issues for which the Tax Authority is responsible, the authority needs technology, but most of all, it needs much more manpower. “In the end, we will need to confront the taxpayer, and the taxpayer will not deal with a computer. At the end of the day, it will be Tax Authority employees who do this. We have hired workers, but we need many more. We will hire many more people, and I hope that, with them, we will reach areas that have been forgotten until now.”
We have surpassed collection targets
Asher noted that the Tax Authority is making great efforts to bring a lot of money to the State in various ways. “We brought NIS 240 billion, when our collection target was NIS 234 billion. The target this year is NIS 250.3 billion, ” he said.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news – www.globes-online.com – on July 7, 2014
