Tax law is complex. Only a handful of people fully understand it and taxes are often controversial. While they pay for various services, who pays and how much are tricky policy questions. Tax laws, like any laws are violated for various reasons. Sometimes, the violations are motivated by greed, but […]
Category: Tax Crimes
Legendary crime boss and Mafioso Al Capone learned the hard way that the tax man always cometh. Even “Scarface” himself wasn’t immune to the eventualities of life: death and taxes. Despite being a known gangster and bootlegger, openly running illegal gambling operations and brothels, extorting countless and being responsible for […]
As high-profile energy industry investor Morris Zuckerman can attest, failure to pay taxes on money earned through energy production can result in serious criminal tax evasion or fraud charges. The Zuckerman case is a complicated one, involving a number of years and myriad investments on behalf of his Manhattan-based M.E. […]
Everyone has heard of notorious U.S. mobster Al Capone. But few may realize that it wasn’t his many crimes committed as a mob boss that landed him in federal prison – it was tax evasion. For years, state and federal prosecutors tried to charge and convict Capone for various crimes […]
The Internal Revenue Service is much more than just the federal agency that collects taxes. It has broad power to investigate individuals and businesses for evidence of potential tax crimes like fraud or evasion involving tax preparation, bankruptcy, banking, gaming, health care, underreporting, employment taxes, identity theft, money laundering, tax […]
Under the Bank Secrecy Act, $10,000 is the threshold amount for triggering various reporting requirements for cash transactions. The law is supposed to deter money laundering by big-time drug dealers, organized crime figures or terrorist groups. Far too often, however, federal authorities accuse ordinary citizens of “structuring” their transactions, i.e., […]
One of the threads we’ve been following in this blog is the effect of IRS budget cuts on tax enforcement. It’s widely known that the overall number of audits is down. But what about criminal investigations? Nearly a year ago, we noted that despite the budget problems caused by a […]
The Fifth Amendment protects an individual from being forced to incriminate himself or herself, often referred to as “pleading the fifth.” In the past, some have unsuccessfully attempted to assert the Fifth Amendment as a reason to avoid filing tax returns, or to file tax returns that don’t report any […]
The IRS continues to struggle with budget cuts, but it is far from toothless. In fact, the agency recently began using nasty new tools that can track cell phone location data by mimicking cell towers. These tools are called “stringrays” or cell-site simulators. Last week, the IRS commissioner went before […]
Financial crimes such as fraud, money laundering or violations of the Bank Secrecy Act do not necessarily relate directly to tax law. Why then is the Criminal Investigation division of the IRS involved in enforcing these laws? In this two-part post, we will address that question. In part one, we […]