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Ex-Credit Suisse client charged by US amid tax evasion probe

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A former Credit Suisse Group AG client was charged with a tax-evasion conspiracy in the U.S. as officials weigh whether the bank — now owned by UBS Group AG — breached a 2014 plea deal in which it paid $2.6 billion and admitted helping thousands of Americans evade taxes.

Gilda Rosenberg, a Florida businesswoman, conspired with two family members in hiding $90 million in assets from the Internal Revenue Service between 2010 and 2017, federal prosecutors charged Wednesday. She’s accused of acting to conceal money in undeclared foreign accounts while also filing false returns and evading taxes on unreported income. 

The extent to which Credit Suisse complied with its plea deal took on new focus after a 2023 Senate Finance Committee report said there were “major violations” of its agreement that requires the bank to identify undeclared U.S. accounts to the IRS. In the report, Democratic staff on the committee said the bank had still failed to fully disclose US assets despite having identified “thousands of previously undeclared accounts” valued at more than $1.3 billion. 

In response to the report, Credit Suisse said it was cooperating and had provided information to U.S. authorities on potentially undeclared accounts held by American clients.

A spokesman for UBS declined to comment Thursday on the case against Rosenberg. An attorney for Rosenberg declined to comment.   

Telling the IRS

The 2023 report doesn’t name the Rosenbergs but describes how the bank allegedly helped a family of dual citizens of the U.S. and Latin American country evade taxes. Whistleblowers told the committee the family members held nearly $100 million at Credit Suisse for a decade before transferring those assets to other banks without telling the IRS. 

The charge against Rosenberg doesn’t identify Credit Suisse, but refer to the same allegations described in the Senate report, according to people familiar with the matter. U.S. authorities are weighing whether the Swiss bank breached the terms of its 2014 deal, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing internal discussions.

UBS said in its third-quarter report that it had a provision for potential costs tied to inquiries into its cross-border wealth management services, including Credit Suisse’s compliance with the 2014 plea deal. It didn’t disclose an amount for the provision.

UBS could announce a settlement with prosecutors for violating terms of the 2014 deal as soon as this week, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. The bank could agree to pay at least hundreds of millions of dollars, according to the report. The UBS spokesperson declined to comment on a possible settlement. 

Under its plea agreement with the U.S., Credit Suisse had to disclose all undeclared U.S. accounts closed and transferred from 2008 to 2014. Disclosing those account holders, known as “leaver lists,” was a U.S. requirement for Credit Suisse, several other Swiss banks that faced criminal charges, and 80 Swiss banks that made deals to avoid prosecution.

At the time of the report in 2023, Senator Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat who chairs the committee, slammed “greedy Swiss bankers” who appeared to be engaged in a “massive, ongoing conspiracy to help ultra-wealthy U.S. citizens to evade taxes.”

The report was released around the same time that Credit Suisse was being sold to rival UBS in a 3 billion franc ($3.3 billion) deal brokered by the Swiss government after years of scandal and mismanagement. 

‘Donate’ assets

Gilda Rosenberg was charged in a so-called criminal information. In a separate case last year, she pleaded guilty in Texas to conspiracy to commit wire fraud involving a Miami vending machine company she owns. She is scheduled to be sentenced on April 30. 

Rosenberg, a U.S. citizen, was born in Colombia and lives in south Florida, according to the tax charge. She conspired with two family members also born in Colombia, the U.S. alleges. They hid money in accounts in Switzerland, Spain, Israel and Andorra, prosecutors charged. 

Rosenberg and one relative agreed to sign documents purporting to “donate” assets in undeclared accounts to the other relative, the U.S. alleges. She also caused her return preparer to underreport income to the IRS and falsely say she had no interest in a foreign financial account, according to the charge.  

Since the bank’s 2014 guilty plea, other U.S. clients of Credit Suisse have been charged in tax cases. In 2016, Dan Horsky pleaded guilty to hiding more than $200 million in assets from the IRS. A Brazilian-American businessman, Dan Rotta, was indicted last year for allegedly using Credit Suisse, UBS and other Swiss banks to hide more than $20 million in assets from U.S. tax authorities over 35 years.

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IAASB tweaks standards on working with outside experts

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The International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board is proposing to tailor some of its standards to align with recent additions to the International Ethics Standards Board for Accountants’ International Code of Ethics for Professional Accountants when it comes to using the work of an external expert.

The proposed narrow-scope amendments involve minor changes to several IAASB standards:

  • ISA 620, Using the Work of an Auditor’s Expert;
  • ISRE 2400 (Revised), Engagements to Review Historical Financial Statements;
  • ISAE 3000 (Revised), Assurance Engagements Other than Audits or Reviews of Historical Financial Information;
  • ISRS 4400 (Revised), Agreed-upon Procedures Engagements.

The IAASB is asking for comments via a digital response template that can be found on the IAASB website by July 24, 2025.

In December 2023, the IESBA approved an exposure draft for proposed revisions to the IESBA’s Code of Ethics related to using the work of an external expert. The proposals included three new sections to the Code of Ethics, including provisions for professional accountants in public practice; professional accountants in business and sustainability assurance practitioners. The IESBA approved the provisions on using the work of an external expert at its December 2024 meeting, establishing an ethical framework to guide accountants and sustainability assurance practitioners in evaluating whether an external expert has the necessary competence, capabilities and objectivity to use their work, as well as provisions on applying the Ethics Code’s conceptual framework when using the work of an outside expert.  

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Tariffs will hit low-income Americans harder than richest, report says

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President Donald Trump’s tariffs would effectively cause a tax increase for low-income families that is more than three times higher than what wealthier Americans would pay, according to an analysis from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

The report from the progressive think tank outlined the outcomes for Americans of all backgrounds if the tariffs currently in effect remain in place next year. Those making $28,600 or less would have to spend 6.2% more of their income due to higher prices, while the richest Americans with income of at least $914,900 are expected to spend 1.7% more. Middle-income families making between $55,100 and $94,100 would pay 5% more of their earnings. 

Trump has imposed the steepest U.S. duties in more than a century, including a 145% tariff on many products from China, a 25% rate on most imports from Canada and Mexico, duties on some sectors such as steel and aluminum and a baseline 10% tariff on the rest of the country’s trading partners. He suspended higher, customized tariffs on most countries for 90 days.

Economists have warned that costs from tariff increases would ultimately be passed on to U.S. consumers. And while prices will rise for everyone, lower-income families are expected to lose a larger portion of their budgets because they tend to spend more of their earnings on goods, including food and other necessities, compared to wealthier individuals.

Food prices could rise by 2.6% in the short run due to tariffs, according to an estimate from the Yale Budget Lab. Among all goods impacted, consumers are expected to face the steepest price hikes for clothing at 64%, the report showed. 

The Yale Budget Lab projected that the tariffs would result in a loss of $4,700 a year on average for American households.

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At Schellman, AI reshapes a firm’s staffing needs

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Artificial intelligence is just getting started in the accounting world, but it is already helping firms like technology specialist Schellman do more things with fewer people, allowing the firm to scale back hiring and reduce headcount in certain areas through natural attrition. 

Schellman CEO Avani Desai said there have definitely been some shifts in headcount at the Top 100 Firm, though she stressed it was nothing dramatic, as it mostly reflects natural attrition combined with being more selective with hiring. She said the firm has already made an internal decision to not reduce headcount in force, as that just indicates they didn’t hire properly the first time. 

“It hasn’t been about reducing roles but evolving how we do work, so there wasn’t one specific date where we ‘started’ the reduction. It’s been more case by case. We’ve held back on refilling certain roles when we saw opportunities to streamline, especially with the use of new technologies like AI,” she said. 

One area where the firm has found such opportunities has been in the testing of certain cybersecurity controls, particularly within the SOC framework. The firm examined all the controls it tests on the service side and asked which ones require human judgment or deep expertise. The answer was a lot of them. But for the ones that don’t, AI algorithms have been able to significantly lighten the load. 

“[If] we don’t refill a role, it’s because the need actually has changed, or the process has improved so significantly [that] the workload is lighter or shared across the smarter system. So that’s what’s happening,” said Desai. 

Outside of client services like SOC control testing and reporting, the firm has found efficiencies in administrative functions as well as certain internal operational processes. On the latter point, Desai noted that Schellman’s engineers, including the chief information officer, have been using AI to help develop code, which means they’re not relying as much on outside expertise on the internal service delivery side of things. There are still people in the development process, but their roles are changing: They’re writing less code, and doing more reviewing of code before it gets pushed into production, saving time and creating efficiencies. 

“The best way for me to say this is, to us, this has been intentional. We paused hiring in a few areas where we saw overlaps, where technology was really working,” said Desai.

However, even in an age awash with AI, Schellman acknowledges there are certain jobs that need a human, at least for now. For example, the firm does assessments for the FedRAMP program, which is needed for cloud service providers to contract with certain government agencies. These assessments, even in the most stable of times, can be long and complex engagements, to say nothing of the less predictable nature of the current government. As such, it does not make as much sense to reduce human staff in this area. 

“The way it is right now for us to do FedRAMP engagements, it’s a very manual process. There’s a lot of back and forth between us and a third party, the government, and we don’t see a lot of overall application or technology help… We’re in the federal space and you can imagine, [with] what’s going on right now, there’s a big changing market condition for clients and their pricing pressure,” said Desai. 

As Schellman reduces staff levels in some places, it is increasing them in others. Desai said the firm is actively hiring in certain areas. In particular, it’s adding staff in technical cybersecurity (e.g., penetration testers), the aforementioned FedRAMP engagements, AI assessment (in line with recently becoming an ISO 42001 certification body) and in some client-facing roles like marketing and sales. 

“So, to me, this isn’t about doing more with less … It’s about doing more of the right things with the right people,” said Desai. 

While these moves have resulted in savings, she said that was never really the point, so whatever the firm has saved from staffing efficiencies it has reinvested in its tech stack to build its service line further. When asked for an example, she said the firm would like to focus more on penetration testing by building a SaaS tool for it. While Schellman has a proof of concept developed, she noted it would take a lot of money and time to deploy a full solution — both of which the firm now has more of because of its efficiency moves. 

“What is the ‘why’ behind these decisions? The ‘why’ for us isn’t what I think you traditionally see, which is ‘We need to get profitability high. We need to have less people do more things.’ That’s not what it is like,” said Desai. “I want to be able to focus on quality. And the only way I think I can focus on quality is if my people are not focusing on things that don’t matter … I feel like I’m in a much better place because the smart people that I’ve hired are working on the riskiest and most complicated things.”

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