US authorities have awarded former UBS banker Bradley Birkenfeld a $104 million reward for blowing the whistle on the Swiss bank's tax fraud, a whistleblowers group said Tuesday.
"This is believed to be the largest reward ever given to an individual whistleblower in the United States and the first major reward issued under the IRS tax whistleblower law," the National Whistleblowers Center said in a statement. Birkenfeld earned the reward from the Internal Revenue Service for providing the US government with "insider information on UBS's illegal offshore banking scheme," said the Washington-based non-profit organisation.