Inside Malta Pension Promoters' Effort to Outsmart IRS

For more than a year, a group of wealth management advisers met regularly to devise strategies to defend their wealthy clients' keeping their riches in individual retirement arrangements based in Malta.

The pension plans—which emerged out of a loophole in a 2011 tax treaty between the US and the Mediterranean island nation widely seen as a tax haven—involved a cottage industry of advisers, accountants, and attorneys to facilitate transactions that allowed cash, business interests, and several types of income to go untaxed.

The plans were added to IRS's "Dirty Dozen" list of dubious tax schemes in July 2021. But participants in the participants' monthly Zoom meetings felt "the IRS was too simple, too lazy, or too stupid to figure out what we were doing," according to one wealth adviser who attended them. That changed in June, when the IRS served hundreds of criminal summonses on taxpayers and Malta pension plan promoters. While no charges have been filed yet, IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel has been vocal about cracking down on abusive tax schemes, especially now that his agency is infused with billions in new funding from last year's tax-and-climate law.

In this week's episode of Talking Tax, host David Schultz talks to Bloomberg Tax reporter Michael J. Bologna about his story digging into the wealth advisers' meetings, how these Malta plans were marketed to high-net-worth individuals, and what's next for the IRS investigation.

Do you have feedback on this episode of Talking Tax? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.