Some comments on this list of FBAR prosecutions and civil suits:

The first, striking, observation is that there are virtually no nonresident defendants. It may be, and it is doubtless the case, that particularly egregious noncompliant U.S. Persons are the subject of sealed indictmdents or civil complaints. Perhaps even the validity of their passports has been untouched with a view to immobilizing them in the United States on arrival, as happened to the Barretts. 

That does not mean that expatriates and nonresident U.S. Persons, including so-called "accidental Americans" are untouched: the privaitzation of enforcement through FATCA means that to the extent that a foreign financial institution is aware that a client is a U.S. Person, assets and income will be reported to the IRS. In the five countries with reciprocal collection agreements, that means that enforcement of IRS claims is possible so long as the target person or entity is not a citizen of the requested country (subject to certain issues as discussed above.) The Dewees case is the most notable of this kind: and typically of some of the most severely penalized, Dewees was badly advised and pressed by his counsel to enter into one of the so-called "amnesty" programs that have been as much a data-collecting project as a forgiveness one. The innocents who -- if they were not in fact likely soon to be targets for prosecution, and especially if they were abroad -- volunteered for OVDP were treated (as the Taxpayer Advocate has said -- more harshly than some violent crimninals, and more harshly than many of those who succeeded in waiting out statutes of limitation. Or spent everything, leaving themselves insolvent. Or fled abroad. Except for a couple of noncompliant Americans abroad who were pardened by President Clinton, we know nothing of these people.

Another, relatively innocent but harshly punished, group consists of immigrants, temporary residents and heirs to foreign decedents; or with complex issues arising from community property or Hindu Undivided Family, foreign trusts and foundations, forced heirship and similar issues unknown or rarely encountered in domestic U.S. law.

It's true that FBARs have been the law since about 1971, when The Wall Street Journal Tax Column mentioned them. But that was before Big Data and before FATCA and before $10,000 became a relatively trivial amount of money to have in banks. The scandalous thing is that enrolled agents, CPAs and tax preparers were never trained to force the issue of declaring foreign assets, foreign corporations, foreign trusts, foreign inheritance. The rules permit the IRS to punish minor and technical deficiencies in submitted forms 5471, 3520, 3520-A, 8938, FBAR and the rest. In fact by and large incorrect forms are returned for correction by the IRS, if not in a manner that successfully educates the do-it-yourself tax filer who depends on TurboTax and its conpetitors. It's also true that having to defend against an abusive assessment or prosecution by the IRS is, itself, an expensive proposition -- although thousands of taxpayers do process their own claims in Tax Court and there are tax clinics at many law schools to help the genuinely poor (although few of these latter will have cross-border complications beyond Canada, Mexico and U.S. territories with "mirror tax". Even an acquittal will leave the targeted taxpayer much the poorer. 

Another striking issue is the manner in which Swiss banks (especially) contrived to reduced their own exposure to panalties (although the biggest banks paid billions) by whistleblowing on their depositors and letting them move their accounts to the private and the cantonal bsnks. This writer was a diplomat in Switzerland in the 1990s, and returned there professionally around 2010. A cantonal bank held a reception for persons interested in vacation apartments, promoting their own mortgage facility. A senior director of the bank told this writer that their bank, unlike the big Swiss banks, had "no expsore" to the U.S. tax enforcement process, and that their depositors were "guaranteed secrecy". Having been a U.S. Government staffer my reply is that such "assurance" was misplaced. Years later one notes with chagrin more than satisfaction that -- as had been the case with WW II gold and insurance policies -- the Swiss Government could not resist Congressional and U.S. Treasury pressures. The Big Swiss banks are smaller, although still multi-national and diversified; the cantonal banks have returned to their roots as community banks for the cantons that founded them.

Of course, especially in this era of low interest rates, the point of FBARs and other foreign-asset declarations is not so much the non-payment of income and even capital gains tax: it is that secret foreign deposits often relate to untaxed business profits and to "dirty money", and may relate to criminal undertaking, money laundering and (in a few cases that since 9/11 and the USA PATRIOT Act have been put forward) terrorism.

And yet it remnains: We don't know how many U.S. Persons live abroad. The (non-)count includes many whose U.S. citizenship has never been established and is unlikely to be so. Persons born abroad are generally presumed aliens although it is not unheard of for a foreign bank to demand a "long-form birth certificate" which may show a U.S. origin of a parent: not that any bank is conpetent to judge whether that parent had the qualifying prior residence or presence in the U.S.A. to pass citienship to a child. There are in any case many millions of U.S. citiens abroad, and (even allowing for non-earning or non-U.S. citizen spouses and children) only a fraction file tax returns and FBARs. The IRS has closed its foreign attaché offices. Aside from American Chambers of Commerce, FaceBook, English-language and other online forums, and banks themselves, there is no publicity. The small number of renunciatios of citienship, made smaller by the $2,350 State Department fee and the cost, to those not exempt, of exit tax (marking assets including (foreign) pensions to market and inposing CGT, and "covered expatriate" inheritance tax, is likely to keep the number small. The IRS is a collection agency: it goes where the money is, and that is not among the middle classes abroad who like the middle class in America have their wealth in houses and in pensions that they are going to defend. On Twitter and on the Isaac Brock Society, FaceBook and elsewhere online one sees the same small group of activists stating their case.

An industry has grown up around the declaration-pena;ty issue, and industry that amplifies   the IRS clarion. One can read through the Criminal Informations and the Indictments and see the varions of innocence, willfulness and guilt, and efforts made to hide assets, or to seek relative advantage of the "amnesty" program. Of course numerous as the csses of record and the litigation found on PACER may be (and nearly all have been trumpeted by DOJ press releases pour encourager les autres, what is not seen are the (probably) much more numerous administrative settlements, and the (probably) less numerous flight by dual nationals or buyers of "golden passports". For some of those, the reckoning will come when and if there are U.S.-based heirs. The early Twentieth Century saw waves of immigrants who came to America to make their fortune: and many who did, took their fortune back home: Mark Wyman, Round-Trip to America: The Immigrants Return to Europe, 1880-1930 (1993). Today, Congress has legislated that such self-made immigrants should share their good fortune with the IRS. These cases, and those of the unknown who left the country and threw away their passports or green cards, tell the story of those who did not care to share, or, sometimes, did not know they had that obligation.