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. […]
Let’s continue the discussion of tax inversion transactions that we began in a post last week. As we noted, transactions by which a U.S. company acquires a partner abroad and avoids U.S. taxes by reincorporating have attracted increasing attention from federal regulators. Last spring, the Treasury Department put into effect […]
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 […]
In a junior-high civics class, the roles seem so settled. The legislative branch makes laws, the executive branch enforces them and the judicial branch interprets them. n practice of course, the interactions of the branches of government are often not so clear. Consider, for example, the current controversy about new […]
There has been a great deal of commotion surrounding the use of offshore bank accounts to shield assets from authorities in the United States. Some of these accounts are used for the purpose of evading income taxes, but there are also many situations where an individual has foreign accounts for […]
For U.S. taxpayers who work abroad, keeping on the right side of regulations poses ongoing headaches and challenges. Some American expatriates have given up their U.S. passports in response. Others have found foreign banks unwilling to deal with them, due to concerns about the compliance burdens of the Foreign Account […]
Litigated cases – involving tax or any other subject – can take a long time to unfold. In this post, we will update you on a long-running Texas case involving tax fraud allegations. The case grew out of a federal investigation into offshore tax shelters set up by two brothers, […]
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., […]
Self-employed workers have tax compliance challenges that other taxpayers do not. The underlying reason for this fairly simple: workers who are considered self-employed for tax purposes have to pay their Social Security and Medicare taxes. You don’t have an employer withholding and paying it for you, but instead have to […]