By Laura Saunders, Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2013

We're still coming after you.  That is the message from the U.S. government to Americans who evaded federal taxes by stashing money in secret offshore accounts, say lawyers who represent some of those people.

After getting a guilty plea from Switzerland's oldest private bank, which was ordered Monday to pay a total of $74 million for violating U.S. tax laws, federal investigators have fresh momentum thanks to leads gathered from interviews with confessed tax cheats.

So far, U.S. officials have clawed back $5.5 billion in unpaid taxes and penalties in the past four years. At least another $5 billion is likely to be collected from continuing cases involving accounts at banks in Switzerland, India, Israel, Hong Kong, Singapore and elsewhere, according to estimates from lawyers who are tracking the various probes.  The number of confessions is expected to rise sharply from the current total of 38,000.

"The government has no intention of letting up in its relentless pursuit of wealthy Americans with secret accounts offshore, and soon it will have even more tools to work with" as a new law goes into effect, said Mark Matthews, a former chief of the Internal Revenue Service's criminal-investigations division [.....]