Why Consider Offshore Banking for Your Personal and Financial Privacy in this Post 9-11

The point is, by moving assets offshore, you regain control. Within the United States, you must play according to federal rules - rules that get a little less citizen-oriented every year. Offshore, there are entire jurisdictions organized to play by your rules. You design the game, and you get to be the winner

There are major concerns concerning privacy. You will hear a staggering number of horror stories from people whose lives have been indelibly marked by corporate and governmental intrusion.

If you're like many Americans, you probably assume that the Constitution ensures your unalienable right to privacy. Unfortunately, you're wrong. The Fourth Amendment - the national guarantee most often cited when people talk about confidentiality - specifies only that "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause...."

The men of 1787 who drafted this legal tenet clearly meant to protect privacy as it pertained to property. They wanted a right to unthreatened ownership of land and personal possession. Our founding fathers lived in a world where people shared common norms of morality. They didn't need to sort through the questions that plague a global information-service economy. They didn't need to worry about how one man might decide to use (or share) private financial information about another. They didn't foresee an era in which sophisticated communication systems could instantaneously interact, calling up, comparing and exchanging information about you or me within a matter of several seconds.

In other words, they didn't foresee the 21st century post 9 /11. Today, the greatest threat to your individual privacy has nothing to do with property theft.

It has to do with access to information about you and your activities. Where you live and work, the names of your children, your medical and psychiatric history, your arrest record, the phone numbers you dial, the amount of money you earn, the way you earn it, and how you report it to Uncle Sam after if s yours - these are the information tidbits that will undoubtedly remain stored in lots of different places as long as you keep your money within U.S. borders.

An offshore financial involvement offers you and your family the one and only escape from this government-endorsed conspiracy. Just as you can legitimately make more money oversees than you could ever hope to earn in this country, you can also look forward to enjoying your foreign profits in an atmosphere of complete confidentiality. In money havens scattered from Hong Kong west to Aruba and south to the Netherlands Antilles, you can benefit from iron-clad secrecy laws that strictly forbid any bureaucratic review of your personal financial records. That means you can legally guard your assets from the overzealous inspection that has become part and parcel of U.S. banking and investment portfolio management.

If you're like most upper- and middle-income Americans, the federal government alone maintains nearly 150 separate files on you. According to one recent analysis, Uncle Sam currently has computer tabs on 10 billion files, a virtual treasure trove through which an army of eager bureaucrats can search and snoop. The state in which you reside probably holds another dozen or so active computer files on you. And the Census Bureau routinely updates its records. Any minute of any day, its computer system can spit out your basic data: sex, race, ethnic origin, marital status, employment situation and place in the household pecking order. Most important, it can legally pass any or all of that information along to other interested branches of government Gary Gensler.

Then, of course, there's the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS knows how much money you make, and where it comes from. The Social Security Administration probably knows more than you do about your employment earnings history. If you served in the armed forces, you're permanently listed in the archives of the Veterans Administration as well as your service branch.

Are you a borrower? If so, then at least one credit bureau (and probably several) keeps a file on you. Lenders nationwide can request from any one of these independent business operations a slew of information about your income, debts, employment history, marital status, tax liens, judgments, arrests and convictions.