(Bloomberg News) The Internal Revenue Service announced that 12,000 taxpayers declared offshore bank accounts in the second round of a voluntary disclosure program that the agency says has yielded $2.7 billion overall.

IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman said today that the agency's emphasis on international tax enforcement prompted more people than anticipated to accept penalties and reveal their accounts.

"The results we're seeing today were unthinkable just a few short years ago," he said on a conference call with reporters. "The world has clearly changed."

The results mark the continuation of the IRS's beefed-up enforcement efforts, which include the voluntary programs as well as prosecutions with the Department of Justice.

"You'd have to be living in a hole not to know that the U.S. government is really focused on offshore tax evasion, getting better at it," Shulman said.

He declined to comment about U.S. efforts to obtain account information from Swiss banks, other than to confirm that the U.S. and Swiss governments are discussing the issue.

"This effort was never about Switzerland," Shulman said. "I think a lot of Swiss banks aren't taking these kinds of accounts anymore and they're really trying hard to move forward."

In 2009, the U.S. and UBS AG reached a deferred-prosecution agreement under which the bank paid $780 million. Since then, the U.S. has been prosecuting clients of UBS, HSBC Holdings Plc and other banks around the world.

The voluntary program allowed U.S. taxpayers with offshore accounts to come forward and pay back taxes and penalties to likely avoid prosecution.

The program's initial round in 2009 yielded $2.2 billion in taxes, interest and penalties from 15,000 taxpayers, Shulman announced today.

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