German tax evaders have been giving themselves up in droves after authorities said they would buy a secret disc with the names of up to 1,500 people hiding cash away in Switzerland, media reports say.
According to the finance ministry in the southern state of Bavaria, cited by the Financial Times Deutschland, more than 270 tax cheats have come forward in one week in that region alone.
At the other end of the country, in the northern city of Hamburg, the number of people handing themselves into authorities jumped from 10 to 88 after Chancellor Angela Merkel's government said it would pay for the information.
The pattern has been repeated across Germany, with many more confessions than normal in Berlin, Lower Saxony and Hessen.
Germany-wide, the hugely controversial purchase of the disc is expected to net the taxman more than €100m, with some estimating proceeds as much as four times that amount.
But the disc came at a financial and diplomatic cost. Germany is set to shell out a reported €2.5m to a mystery informer and relations with its Alpine neighbour Switzerland soured as Berne saw the purchase of the data as an attack on its cherished banking secrecy.
