On November 20, 2018, IRS issued a memo on its new voluntary disclosure program (“Voluntary Disclosure Program” or “Program”), following the offshore voluntary disclosure program’s termination on September 28, 2018. The Voluntary Disclosure Program provides taxpayers with a process for voluntarily disclosing tax noncompliance for both domestic and offshore assets to avoid potential criminal liability and prosecution. IRS has discretion to apply the Voluntary Disclosure Program’s procedures to all domestic voluntary disclosures received on or before September 28, 2018. Taxpayers have long been able to disclose voluntarily their tax noncompliance to IRS, either pursuant to IRS’s long-standing practice of allowing voluntary disclosure, under IRM 9.5.11.9, or using the streamlined compliance procedures. However, the Voluntary Disclosure Program is arguably better for taxpayers, in that it provides precise procedures and guarantees that participant taxpayers will not be criminally prosecuted. Under the prior practice, voluntary disclosure was only a factor taken into consideration when determining whether to prosecute criminally.
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Spring Newsletter 2019
Podcast: Texas v. United States of America

In this Ropes & Gray podcast, Isabelle Farrar, a senior associate in the tax controversy group is joined by Harvey Cotton, a principal in the tax and benefits group, and Elizabeth Smith, counsel in the tax controversy group, to discuss the December 2018 decision from the Northern District of Texas in Texas v. United…
New York Judge Finds $600M Opioid Surcharge Unconstitutional

In December 2018, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled that New York’s $600 million fee on the sale of opioids into the state unconstitutionally prohibits pharmaceutical companies from passing the cost onto consumers. Furthermore, the Court ruled that the Opioid Stewardship Act (OSA) violated U.S. Constitution’s dormant commerce clause…
Podcast: Cum-Ex Dividend Trade Investigations

In this Ropes & Gray podcast, Alec Oveis, an associate in the tax and benefits group is joined by Kat Gregor, a partner in the tax group and co-founder of the tax controversy group, and Andy Howard, a partner in the tax group, to discuss the investigations now underway in Europe involving so-called “cum-ex…