The finance minister of the German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg is prepared to pay for more data on Germans who may have dodged taxes and stashed money in secret Swiss accounts, he told a newspaper in an interview.
In an article published on Sunday, Finance Minister Nils Schmid said German tax officials were only doing their job when paying for bank account details, because they were reclaiming data that had been illegally withheld from them.
"We will continue to uncover individual cases, be it by investigations, buying further tax CDs or self-declarations," he told Switzerland''s German language SonntagsZeitung.
The two countries have been locked in a dispute for years, with German officials paying for stolen Swiss bank account data on CD and Swiss banks having their offices in Germany searched.
"We''re not instigating anything. But if German tax authorities know of such tax CDs, according to German principles under the rule of law they have to take them up and pursue them, and possibly also initiate a criminal prosecution," Schmid said.
Last week, Germany and Switzerland amended an existing deal on taxing secret offshore accounts, toughening terms for tax dodgers after the main German opposition party blocked the original accord, saying it was too lenient.
On Saturday, German weekly Der Spiegel said the head of the tax inspectors office in Wuppertal in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia was in negotiations to buy two new sets of data.
Schmid, a member of the German Social Democrats (SPD), criticised the terms of the newly amended agreement as still too lenient, providing tax dodgers with a loophole to take their money out of Switzerland to another country.
Swiss authorities caused an outcry in Germany last weekend when they said they had issued arrest warrants for three German tax inspectors, accusing them of industrial espionage for buying bank details of German tax evaders.