I thought this story was fascinating, so I did a little bit of background digging, since this article is pretty thin.
There are a bunch of relevant legal documents and news stories up at http://www.pogo.org/pogo-files/alerts/whistleblower-issues/w... Note that this is very much a pro-whistleblower site, and so is slanted towards the idea that Birkenfeld shouldn't be in prison. I'm not so sure, though.
According to Birkenfeld's own request for clemency, the sequence of events that led to him going to the IRS was: after ~4 years of working with wealthy clients at UBS, in June 2005, he found an internal legal document prohibiting many of the actual practices of the bank. He wrote an internal memo to his superiors about the discrepancy, and then resigned in October 2005. When UBS didn't pay him a bonus he thought he was entitled to, in early 2006, he invoked whistleblower protection claiming that UBS was retaliating against him, in an effort to recover that bonus.
He didn't approach the IRS and DOJ, though, until early 2007, and didn't actually talk until June 2007. And while he described UBS's practices, he didn't go into specific details about clients except for one, Igor Olenicoff, for whom he had, among other things, smuggled diamonds in a toothpaste tube. It's his activity dealing with Olenicoff that he's in prison for, and he pleaded guilty to those charges.
There are a bunch of relevant legal documents and news stories up at http://www.pogo.org/pogo-files/alerts/whistleblower-issues/w... Note that this is very much a pro-whistleblower site, and so is slanted towards the idea that Birkenfeld shouldn't be in prison. I'm not so sure, though.
According to Birkenfeld's own request for clemency, the sequence of events that led to him going to the IRS was: after ~4 years of working with wealthy clients at UBS, in June 2005, he found an internal legal document prohibiting many of the actual practices of the bank. He wrote an internal memo to his superiors about the discrepancy, and then resigned in October 2005. When UBS didn't pay him a bonus he thought he was entitled to, in early 2006, he invoked whistleblower protection claiming that UBS was retaliating against him, in an effort to recover that bonus.
He didn't approach the IRS and DOJ, though, until early 2007, and didn't actually talk until June 2007. And while he described UBS's practices, he didn't go into specific details about clients except for one, Igor Olenicoff, for whom he had, among other things, smuggled diamonds in a toothpaste tube. It's his activity dealing with Olenicoff that he's in prison for, and he pleaded guilty to those charges.
Tellingly, though, Olenicoff was already under IRS investigation in - drumroll - 2006 (http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2006/1009/042.html), and he eventually pleaded guilty to tax evasion in December 2007 and paid $52M in back taxes and fines (http://www.irs.gov/newsroom/article/0,,id=212163,00.html).
To me, Birkenfeld's actions look a lot more like CYA than principled whistleblowing.