Swiss President Wants Tax Accord From U.S. BERN - Switzerland would be prepared to sign a global deal on banking secrecy with the United States "tomorrow," the Swiss president said, blaming Washington for an apparent impasse. "We are ready," President Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, who is also finance minister, said here in the Swiss capital Wednesday. We've made a lot of constructive proposals. We could sign it tomorrow if the United States wants to do it. Relations between the United States and Switzerland have been troubled by the tax evasion question since late 2008, when the U.S. authorities began pursuing UBS, the largest Swiss bank, for helping thousands of Americans to hide taxes from the Internal Revenue Service. UBS later settled with the U.S. Justice Department, turning over details of 4,450 client accounts and paying a fine of $780 million in exchange for a deferred prosecution agreement. With their financial sector under intense global scrutiny, Swiss officials have been working to reach an agreement with Washington that would allow them to retain something of their 1934 banking law, which makes the disclosure of client identities a crime. But the U.S. authorities have shown little interest in compromise, the Swiss say, and are pursuing criminal investigations of 11 Swiss banks, including Credit Suisse, the country's second largest. In a sign of the hard-knuckle approach Washington is taking, prosecutors in February indicted Wegelin & Co., Switzerland's oldest bank, for helping Americans evade $1.2 billion in taxes. That prompted the bank, founded in 1741, to announce it was breaking up, raising fears among the Swiss that Washington might pick off others. The Swiss presidency rotates among the seven members of the country's executive, the Federal Council, with a different member serving each year. The role makes Ms. Widmer-Schlumpf, 55 and a lawyer by training, "first among equals" on the Federal Council and the face of Switzerland in many international settings. "We were very surprised by the Wegelin indictment," Ms. Widmer-Schlumpf said, "because we understood there to be an implicit agreement that they would not do something like that during the negotiations." She said that there had been "considerable progress" toward a global deal over the past few months. A final agreement will include deferred prosecution deals against Swiss banks accused of helping American tax evaders, fines and "a substantial transfer" of client data to the Internal Revenue Service, she said. Ms. Widmer-Schlumpf said that Switzerland, which accounts for more than one-quarter of the world's offshore wealth, was not prepared to abandon banking secrecy altogether, and that the data transfer "has to take place within the existing legal procedures in both countries." "States have rights, and we have to respect that," she said, expressing hope that a deal would be reached soon. I think it's in the interest of both sides to come to a solution now. Ms. Widmer-Schlumpf spoke after the Swiss Parliament on Monday approved a new double-taxation treaty with the United States, under which the U.S. authorities will be able to more easily track suspected tax cheats, even without naming names, by asking for information on particular types of suspicious accounts. Donald S. Beyer Jr., the U.S. ambassador to Switzerland, told Swiss radio this week that it was a "positive and useful step." Paul L. Behling, a partner at the law firm Withers Bergman in New Haven, Connecticut, said that the Swiss Parliament's approval "eliminates the legal obstacle to a deal" between the banks and the I.R.S. Switzerland's banking secrecy law has complicated banks" efforts to resolve the U.S. conflict. Another source of friction is the distinction made by the Swiss, and virtually no one else, between tax fraud, a crime here, and tax evasion, which is not.