One group has estimated that over $21 trillion American dollars in secret tax havens were stashed by the end of 2010. Others have said that $21 trillion is a conservative figure, and the real amount of income being stashed is around $32 trillion.
Mind you, this is trillions of dollars, not billions. Tax Havens such as the Cayman Islands, Geneva, and other locales make it easy for wealthy people to store money and avoid national taxes of the their home country.
Upon investigating this trend, I came across an article about a doctor in Florida who earned just under $300,000 one year. Instead of filing taxes, he wire transferred the money to one of the Caribbean tax havens. He claimed only $36 dollars in earnings to the IRS, and paid only $4 dollars in Federal taxes. He was later charged and prosecuted by the IRS and did several years in prison for tax evasion.
It is said that less than 100,000 people worldwide own 9.8 trillion dollars in offshore assets. That is an average of 98 million dollars per person, though there is no real method to determine how many of these people may be hiding a significant portion of their wealth from their home governments.
Kyle Langlois's Blog 