The “Weissgeldstrategie”, voluntary disclosures and domestic secrecy

The clean money strategy

As the defences of banking secrecy fell one after another, the Federal Council sought to give the financial centre a positive programme. In December 2009 it adopted strategic directions for Swiss financial market policy, which named quality, stability and integrity as objectives. In the following years the term Weissgeldstrategie, or clean money strategy, came to describe the aim that Swiss banks should manage only assets that were properly taxed. The Federal Council’s report on financial market policy of December 2012 described the strategy as resting on enhanced due diligence obligations for financial intermediaries, designed to prevent banking secrecy from being misused to conceal untaxed or criminal assets.¹

The strategy had several legal components. The revision of the anti-money laundering legislation, adopted in 2014 to implement the revised recommendations of the Financial Action Task Force of 2012, made aggravated tax offences predicate offences to money laundering. A bank that accepted or retained assets that it knew or should have presumed to derive from qualified tax fraud now exposed itself and its employees to prosecution under Article 305bis of the Criminal Code.² The planned additional due diligence obligations concerning the tax compliance of new assets were not enacted as a separate statute. The banks implemented tax compliance checks through their own policies, supported by the supervisory expectations of FINMA and by the practical consequences of automatic exchange.

Voluntary disclosures in Switzerland and abroad

A second component was the regularisation of the past. For Swiss taxpayers, the Confederation introduced a limited amnesty, the so-called kleine Steueramnestie, which entered into force on 1 January 2010. A taxpayer who reports his own tax evasion for the first time avoids the penalty and pays only the back taxes and default interest, provided that the tax authorities were not yet aware of the evasion and that the taxpayer cooperates fully. Heirs who disclose the evasion of a deceased person benefit from a shortened recovery period of three years.³ The Federal Department of Finance stresses that the penalty-free voluntary disclosure is available only once in a lifetime. With regard to foreign accounts reported under the automatic exchange, the Federal Tax Administration presumes knowledge of the relevant tax factors as of 30 September 2018, so that disclosures of such accounts after that date no longer qualify as voluntary.⁴

For foreign clients, the regularisation took place under the law of their home states. The voluntary disclosure programmes of the Internal Revenue Service, the German Selbstanzeige, the British disclosure facilities and comparable procedures in France, Italy and other states absorbed tens of thousands of cases. Swiss banks played an active role in this process. From about 2012 onwards, many Zurich banks required foreign clients to provide evidence of tax compliance within a fixed period, failing which the relationship was terminated.⁵ Termination was itself governed by rules. The banks had to avoid facilitating the transfer of undeclared money to other secrecy jurisdictions, since such transfers would appear on the leaver lists and in the records reviewed by the American authorities. Transfers in cash or in precious metals raised particular concerns under the anti-money laundering rules.

The survival of domestic banking secrecy

The end of banking secrecy for foreign clients did not extend to Swiss residents. Domestic banking secrecy survived the period largely intact, because Swiss tax authorities still cannot obtain bank information from a bank in the ordinary assessment procedure in cases of simple tax evasion. The Federal Council prepared a revision of the tax criminal law that would have allowed cantonal tax authorities better access to bank information in cases of suspected evasion. In reaction, the Swiss People’s Party launched on 17 May 2013 the popular initiative “Yes to the protection of privacy”, which sought to enshrine the protection of financial privacy in the Constitution. The initiative was submitted on 23 October 2014 with 117,596 valid signatures.⁶

The Federal Council recommended the rejection of the initiative, arguing that it would endanger the proper collection of taxes. The National Council supported both the initiative and a direct counter-proposal, while the Council of States rejected both. After Parliament had definitively abandoned the revision of the tax criminal law that had provoked the initiative, the initiators withdrew it on 9 January 2018, stating that it had served its purpose as a sword of Damocles.⁷ The outcome is characteristic of Swiss politics in this field. The country accepted far-reaching transparency towards foreign states because it had no practical alternative, while it maintained the traditional relationship between its own citizens and its own tax authorities. Swiss residents with accounts in Switzerland therefore remain in a different position from foreign residents with the same accounts. The difference has so far proved politically stable.

Notes

1. Federal Council, Bericht zur Finanzmarktpolitik des Bundes (n. above). The report also refers to the Liechtenstein Disclosure Facility agreed with the United Kingdom as a model for regularising the past. ↩
2. Swiss Criminal Code, Article 305bis number 1bis, inserted by the Federal Act of 12 December 2014 implementing the revised FATF Recommendations of 2012, in force since 1 January 2016, https://www.droit-bilingue.ch/de-en/3/31/311.0-305bis-372.html. The qualified tax offence for direct taxes is defined by reference to evaded taxes exceeding CHF 300,000 per tax period. ↩
3. Kantonales Steueramt Zürich, “Merkblatt des kantonalen Steueramtes zur straflosen Selbstanzeige und zur vereinfachten Nachbesteuerung von Erben”, Zürcher Steuerbuch No. 241a.1, https://www.zh.ch/de/steuern-finanzen/steuern/treuhaender/steuerbuch/steuerbuch-definition/zstb-241a-1.html. ↩
4. Federal Department of Finance, “Straflose Selbstanzeige und vereinfachte Erben-Nachbesteuerung”, https://www.efd.admin.ch/de/straflose-selbstanzeige-vereinfachte-erben-nachbesteuerung. ↩
5. The practice varied from bank to bank. In November 2013 Credit Suisse had set its German and French clients a deadline of the end of 2013 to regularise their tax position or face termination of the relationship, while UBS allowed until the end of 2014 and Julius Bär pursued a comparable policy: swissinfo.ch, “Nur weisses Geld aus Deutschland und Frankreich”, 29 November 2013, https://www.swissinfo.ch/ger/wirtschaft/nur-weisses-geld-aus-deutschland-und-frankreich/37436280; see also moneycab, “Schweizer Banken drängen deutsche Kunden zu Steuerehrlichkeit”, 27 April 2013, https://www.moneycab.com/?p=1095499. ↩
6. Année politique suisse / Politchronik, “Volksinitiative ‘Ja zum Schutz der Privatsphäre’”, https://politchronik.swiss/de/prozesse/15258-ja-zum-schutz-der-privatsphare. ↩
7. Ibid. The initiative was dealt with in Parliament as business 15.057. ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of September 2025.