First, you’ve got a pile of money. Real money. Investment-banker money. Family money. CEO money. Sold-your-company money.

Second, you like to keep that money. And so that’s what you’ve done. You’ve locked the loot away safely in a bank—a big, famous bank, the biggest private bank in the world—away from the tax man, in Switzerland, a nation famous for its bankers’ discretion.

And now, you’re very nervous. Because that famous Swiss discretion has cracked. You could well be one of the 4,450 Americans whose names the Swiss have agreed to turn over to the IRS to settle a long-running dispute over Americans hiding money from tax authorities in UBS bank accounts.

Tax attorneys and other experts say that’s just what the government wants. The government wants you to sweat.

The aim of the feds, they say, is to collect taxes from a lot more people than just the 4,450 represented in the settlement with the Swiss. UBS has agreed to turn over information on those accounts to Swiss authorities, who will then review the data and turn it over to the U.S. IRS commissioner Doug Shulman said the criteria for choosing the targets was being kept confidential, but at one time the accounts in question held more than $18 billion.

Experts say the government is hoping to scare many more people than just the 4,450 into participating in an amnesty program running through September 23 that could leave them paying back taxes and penalties, but free from criminal prosecution.

“The whole point of the 4,450 is to make 20,000 nervous,” said John Coffee, professor at Columbia Law School. “The U.S. government really wants to intimidate people into entering the voluntary program. There will likely be some high-profile criminal indictments between now and September 23.”

And people are indeed scared, said Rich Boggs, CEO of Nationwide Tax Relief. “Someone at the IRS told my staff that in one week in July they had 400 percent more phone calls regarding voluntary disclosure than in all of 2008.”

George Clarke, a member of Washington, D.C., law firm Miller & Chevalier’s white-collar and internal investigations and tax practice, said his phone has been ringing off the hook with calls from worried clients who have overseas accounts.

“In the last two weeks, it’s been crazy,” he said.

Michael Weinstein, an attorney at Cole Schotz and a former trial attorney with the U.S. Justice Department who represents some individuals with offshore accounts, agrees that it’s scary right now for people with the aforementioned accounts.