Any lawyers care to weigh in on Stepian using the Fifth Amendment on a document subpoena?

[Gothmog]

9. There has been some recent opinions on this issue with respect to off-shore accounts

The article cited in the OP is excellent. I read this article over the weekend and I doubt that Septien's attorney is going to be successful in his opposition to the subpoenas.

I also found this article dealing with off-shore bank accounts http://www.forbes.com/sites/insider/2013/02/27/required-records-the-act-of-production-and-secret-offshore-accounts/

In its ongoing battle to eradicate the use of offshore accounts to conceal assets (and evade taxes), the government has served subpoenas on numerous taxpayers who it suspects have (or had) undisclosed offshore accounts. These subpoenas seek information under an obscure requirement that individuals keep records relating to their offshore accounts. Of course, many recipients of these subpoenas face the very quandary the Fifth Amendment was designed to protect against: producing documents in response to the subpoena would concede that they violated the reporting requirements applicable to offshore accounts.

Over the last 18 months, four federal Courts of Appeals (chronologically, the Ninth, Seventh, Fifth and Eleventh Circuits) have considered the issue and all four have rejected the taxpayers’ attempts to invoke the Fifth Amendment, concluding that the “required records” doctrine trumps the “act of production” privilege. As I wrote after the first of these decisions (and at a time when federal courts were split on the issue), this conclusion is principally predicated on the perception that the record-keeping requirement is “essentially regulatory” and that the conduct at issue was not “inherently criminal.”

Right now, I do not think that Septien's attorney is going to be successful in resisting these subpoenas