Evaluation of Two Court Decisions on J. Bryan Williams Case

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Subject: Evaluation of two Court Decisions on J. Bryan Williams Case Date: September 25, 2013 After careful analysis of both the United District Court and the U.S. Court of Appeal decisions on taxpayer Bryan William’s case, I find that the U.S. Court of Appeal did a better job of determining when failure to file a foreign account interest or control form is a willful act. How Fair or Equitable the Position is To the extent of how fair or equitable the position is, I am more convinced by the U.S. Court of Appeal that at a minimum, Williams’s undisputed actions established reckless conduct, which satisfied the proof requirement under Section 5314. According to the United District Court, Williams lacked any motivation to willfully conceal the accounts from authorities after he was noticed of the U.S. authorities’ awareness of his ALQI account. However, merely relied on this fact, it’s still hard to be convinced that Williams was not consciously planning scheme to evade income tax. Also, the United District Court was not persuaded that Williams was lying about his ignorance to the contents of the Form 1040 based on the fact that Williams relied on his accountant to fill out the Form and he had never been advised of the existence of the TDF 90-22.1. However, the “yes” or “no” box indicating whether a taxpayer has an interest in financial accounts in a foreign country on Schedule B is understandable to reasonable persons. The United District Court judged Williams’ failure to check “yes” as understandable omission is not fair. In contrast, the U.S. Court of Appeal clearly stated that in Williams’s guilty plea allocution, he acknowledged that he willfully failed to report the existence of the ALQI accounts to the IRS as part of his larger scheme of tax evasion, which weakened the decision of the

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