Everyone has heard the urban legend of or seen movies about “numbered bank acounts,” where you can protect money from sue happy lawyers and such, or run an international spy organization. These usually tend to be exotic swiss bank accounts.
My comment here is that despite what people say to the contrary, including all the movies and shows you see, it is my belief that it is no longer possible to obtain these numbered accounts. The Swiss can’t for one, as they will be going as far as taxing all european held accounts for the EU, as a result of financial pressure. This is despite their claims of being a “banking haven” and supposed secrecy. Other popular territories are no longer even able to offer tax haven benefits due to pressures put on them by counties that control them like the UK, or threatening countries like the US, who is using terrorist scares as an excuse to put undue pressures in world financial circles hopes of reaping more taxes.
Apparently people still believe these exist, and that they are just “missing out” on them, as the are a “secret of the rich” or “for super spy organizations.” Appearantly it is just a big conspiracy that we are missing out on. As this email is the result of a recent discussion, I would love to hear anything someone can tell me to the contrary specifically regarding countries that supposedly still have “numbered accounts”, or any more general knowledge regarding “offshore havens” in todays global market world.
ALL bank accounts are numbered…you are thinking of an account which as no accompanying identifying name: how can something like that work? With checks, you need to endorse with a name, and sometimes you need several other forms of ID. Just saying you are in control of account # 125-36248-74 won’t fly!
Mainly through bad publicity regarding dormant Nazi accounts, the Swiss system has become slightly less secretive - such as in this recent article. WAG, but I should think that nowadays, it’s easier to find a corrupt Russian bank to hide your money with than an honest-and-secretive Swiss one.
(BTW, Switzerland isn’t in the EU)
I used to have a Swiss bank account! It wasn’t very interesting, just a convinient way to transfer money around.
Cecil’s column isn’t too way off the mark, but there are a few innacuracies. The major one is that no-one can gain any information on your account (even its very existence) without an explicit court order. For a judge to grant such an order, he had to have evidence that you have broken a Swiss law. You can still open a numbered account, but you have to have around $100,000 to do so, plus you have to have very good references and a vary good proof of income.
The current tax rate for interest earned on Swiss bank accounts is aound 35%. You can claim most of that back (at least in the US) by declaring it to the IRS.
This is true nowadays, but it wasn’t always so. In my previous employment, an older gentlemen who’d been in banking all his life, related to me his early experiences, as a computer programmer in 1961 for banks. He had a job where he traveled across the US with a team on a mission to sell computers to banks. He said the hardest part of the job was the incredible resistance of the small-town bank to the idea of account numbers. Their customers were not numbers, they were the local folks - the people. The accounts were kept on paper by the names of their customers, and to computerize this with numbers for accounts would ruin how they viewed their customers, and their image in the eyes of their customers.
As an aside, it was also a regular thing for one to lend a neighbor a check at the grocery store when the neighbor had run out but forgot to refill the checkbook - to use such a check as your own was just a matter of crossing out the preprinted name at the top of the check and writing in your own name. People didn’t know or even notice the newfangled numbers along the bottoms of their checks.
Obviously ALL bank accounts have account numbers. To clarify, we are referring to the legendary “numbered accounts” which are anonymous bank accounts that are indentified by a number rather than a name, thus the urban legend title.
Ironically, I made the exact same offhand comment about all accounts being numbered as above when arguing that “number accounts” are more legend than fact.
I should note that numbered accounts still exist in Switzerland, as they were “grandfathered” in, however it is questionable if it is possible to get a truely anonymous account, as personal information must be provided to banks for EU taxes and money laudering law purposes, even in Swiss banks. Even though they claim to be “secretive,” they really aren’t.
I was already aware of cecils article, however it is painfully out of date (being from 1981) and somewhat inaccurate today. Much has changed even in the last 2 years with regards to “banking secrecy” through the world due to pressure from the USA, UK, and the EU so they get their cut of everyones money worldwide.
So in what way did a Swiss acount make tranfering money easier?
As you comment in your email, the Swiss now charge a tax that is being imposed by the EU. Personal tax info is reported to the countries in the EU. This is the result of a tax treaty they were forced into. They have also been forced to sign a money laundering law, which is part of a treaty that states that the Swiss court must order information to be given if ANY law in the EU is broken as well, not just Switzerland. This would have to include money laundering laws. I believe that this was done in some kind of “mutual assistance” treaty which includes other things too, some of which the Swiss need, allowing this to be forced in.
If your information and name is reported just the same whether or not you designated a number on your account rather than your name, you really still don’t have an anonymous numbered account, making it really just a farce. Even with this there still does seem to be a question if legit banks still allow new numbered accounts in Switzerland.
