Category Archives: criminal tax law

According to Law360, the Internal Revenue Service is in a position to resolve its backlog of unprocessed tax returns, which number in the tens of millions, by the end of this year, IRS Commissioner Chuck

Rettig told House lawmakers on March 17, 2022.

Barring any unanticipated developments, such as those related to the pandemic, the IRS should be able to enter the next calendar year having resolved its backlog, Rettig said during a hearing before the Ways and Means oversight subcommittee.

In testimony provided to the Senate Finance Committee last month, National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins said that as of early February, the IRS had approximately 23.5 million returns, correspondence and account management cases in its inventory that needed to be processed manually. The IRS announced in January that it would be deploying so-called surge teams that would help return the agency's processing and correspondence inventories to a "healthy level."

As part of the surge teams, the IRS has brought 800 experienced employees onto its account management team and, as of Thursday, has added 700 workers to its submissions processing operations, Rettig said during the hearing.

The IRS was also granted direct-hire authority from the Office of Personnel Management to fill some 10,000 entry-level positions in submission processing and account management, Tony Reardon, head of the National Treasury Employees Union, previously told Law360. That authority went into effect only two days ago, Rettig said.

Employees can be on-boarded within 30 to 45 days under the direct-hire authority, Rettig said, compared with the normal six- to eight-month process.

"I'm pleased to say that we put out that announcement and we received multiples of that from folks who are coming on board," he said.

Still, the IRS is consistently "out-gunned" when it comes to complex matters involving partnerships, despite having 6,500 experienced field agents active, Rettig said.

"We do not have the resources to go after the 'bigs' or the 'super bigs' as we refer to them," he said.

Rettig has previously told lawmakers that the agency is outmanned on those types of issues.

Have an IRS Tax Problem?

 Contact the Tax Lawyers at

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Read more at: Tax Times blog

According to Law360, the Internal Revenue Service's Criminal Investigation division lost about a quarter of its workforce since 2010.

The IRS Said In a Fact Sheet That The Division's Staff Had Dropped About 25%, to Below 3,000 Employees, From 4,017 in 2010.

Nonetheless, the agency said, the division managed last year to identify $10.4 billion in tax fraud and financial crime and likely deterred at least an equivalent amount of criminal behavior, using a budget of $600 million.

The IRS also released an item highlighting broad categories of cases the CI division tackles, including tax, narcotics and cryptocurrency investigations, with specific case examples under each umbrella.

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According to Law360, a California woman the government is suing in federal court for nearly $120 million in penalties over alleged violations of foreign bank account reporting rules is not complying with IRS summonses, the U.S. said on March 16, 2022.Barry without The case is U.S. v. Francis Burga et al., case number 5:18-cv-01633, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Jose Division.

Francis Burga has produced documents sought by the Internal Revenue Service, according to a status report filed by the U.S., but hasn't indicated when additional documents she requested from another individual will arrive. The government has said that it can't determine whether she has complied with the summonses, which are being enforced by a court order, until it can review all the material they are expected to yield.

Efforts to enforce the summonses are unfolding parallel to a separate case centered on claims that Burga and her late husband willfully failed to file reports on their foreign bank accounts. She and Margelus Burga, founder of the data storage design and manufacturing company Glide/Write USA, had hundreds of bank accounts between 2004 and 2009 in several countries for which they failed to file the reports, the government said.

According To The U.S., The Burgas Were Also Involved In
a False Invoicing Scheme At Glide/Write That Relied in Part
on A Liechtenstein Trust Their Financial Adviser, Peter Meier, Helped To Manage.

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In FS-2022-18 the IRS spotlights IRS Criminal Investigation (CI) serves the American public by investigating potential criminal violations of the Internal Revenue Code and related financial crimes in a manner that fosters confidence in the tax system and compliance with the law. 

It is the only federal law enforcement agency authorized to investigate federal criminal tax violations and pursues related financial crimes, such as money laundering, currency violations, and terrorist financing. 

In recent years, CI has significantly expanded its presence in areas of emerging importance. Since 2015, it has built up a world-class cybercrimes program to address the exponential growth of cybercrimes impacting the tax, financial, and economic systems of the U.S. This group successfully seized more than $3.5 billion of illicit cryptocurrency in fiscal year 2021, and they have already seized more than this amount in fiscal year 2022.

Amount of Such Behavior, With a Budget of Just Over $600M.

A snapshot of recent IRS CI work 

1. Russian Bank Founder Sentenced For Evading Taxes
 

In 2013, when the value of Oleg Tinkov’s investment in his Russian bank’s stock rose to over $1 billion, he quickly renounced his U.S. citizenship and substantially understated his wealth on tax filings with the IRS to avoid exit taxes. Expatriation law requires that those with a net worth of more than $2 million pay taxes on their assets as if they were sold on the day before expatriation, but despite the value of his post-Initial Public Offering assets rising to above $1.1 billion, Tinkov claimed he did not have assets above $2 million. In addition, he did not report any gain from the constructive sale of his property worth more than $1.1 billion, causing a tax loss of nearly $250 million. A year after his expatriation, Tinkov was the 15th richest oligarch in Russia, with an estimated net worth of over $8 billion.

Tinkov was indicted in September of 2019 for willfully filing false tax returns following an investigation by CI agents, and he was arrested in February 2020. As part of his restitution, Oleg Tinkov paid $508,936,184, which is more than double the amount he sought to escape paying to the U.S. Treasury through renouncing his U.S. citizenship and concealing from the IRS large stock gains, which he knew were reportable. This payment includes $248,525,339 in taxes, statutory interest on that tax, and a nearly $100 million fraud penalty.

2. $1.3 Billion Tax Shelter Scheme

IRS-CI’s primary resource commitment involves the investigation of tax crimes, which constitute over 70% of investigative time by CI agents. Resources are especially focused on unpacking complex structures that facilitate abusive tax schemes by wealthy individuals and corporations.

To take a recent example, in February 2022, a grand jury returned an indictment of seven individuals with conspiracy to defraud the United States and other crimes because of their promotion of fraudulent tax shelters involving syndicated conservation easements for at least two decades. The co-conspirators allegedly guaranteed a 4-to-1 tax deduction ratio to their clients and invoked various schemes to value easements as necessary to deliver the ratio promised. The indictment charged that these were abusive tax shelters lacking in economic substance and further contended that the defendants helped clients claim illicit charitable deductions after the conclusion of tax years through backdating documents. In total, the defendants allegedly sold over $1.3 billion in false and fraudulent tax deductions through their crimes.

Over the course of a four-year investigation, IRS-CI agents dedicated thousands of hours to unpacking the schemes these perpetrators allegedly facilitated to help their wealthy clients skirt tax obligations. These kinds of investigations involve incredibly complicated work for the CI team, as the tax shelters are often intentionally designed to impede the ability of the IRS to detect their fraudulent nature, including through appraisals that overinflate land values and fake votes among participants meant to create the illusion that the transactions are legitimate real estate investment opportunities and not abusive tax shelters. With additional resources and investigative support, IRS-CI could reduce the investigative time and ensure that criminals are held accountable quicker.

3. $3.6 Billionof Stolen Cryptocurrency Seized In FY 2021 (Already Surpassed In FY 2022)

Over the last several years, CI has observed significant growth in the number of criminals using the cyber environment for fraud and illicit transactions. This criminality is made possible by an underlying technological ecosystem that facilitates remaining anonymous and eluding law enforcement while concealing financial transactions, ownership of assets, or other evidence. The possibility that these technologies will be deployed to facilitate sanctions evasion is also top-of-mind for CI investigators at present.

In order to navigate this landscape, CI must deploy sophisticated blockchain analysis tools to unweave darknet transactions. For example, following the prosecution of Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht in 2015 for several criminal counts, CI agents were tasked with the persistent investigation of stolen funds from this and other dark net marketplaces. As a result of their determined and resolute action, CI agents seized approximately $1 billion of Bitcoin in 2020. Finding these funds required the efforts of several CI agents and contractors, including the use of third-party analytic tools to trace assets to individuals who had hacked Silk Road to pocket illicit gains.

Even more recently, in February of this year, two individuals were arrested for laundering cryptocurrency stolen during a 2016 hack of a digital asset exchange. Thus far, $3.6 billion has been seized by CI agents who managed to track unauthorized transactions that sent stolen Bitcoin from this hack to digital wallets under the control of the launderers. The defendants allegedly employed numerous complex techniques to hide these funds, including automating transactions to quickly move funds and then deposit them into a variety of currency exchanges and darknet markets and withdrawing funds to break the chain of transactions and impeded detection.

Despite this complexity, today CI currently devotes only about six percent of its investigative time to cybercrimes/crypto currency, so it is just scratching the surface of the amount of criminal activity that is being detected.

Click IRS-CI Highlights for more examples of the types of cases in which CI has led or been significantly involved in over the last few years.

Given the magnitude of the challenge it faces, it is imperative for CI to be adequately funded to investigate and prosecute criminals. CI, like the rest of the IRS, is in desperate need of stable, long-term funding to develop a deeper understanding of the global financial landscape and trace and seize assets that today are in the hands of criminals.

Failed To File or Pay Your Taxes?

Like Your Freedom?

for FREE Tax HELP Contact Us at:

www.TaxAid.com or www.OVDPLaw.com 

or Toll Free at 888-8TaxAid (888-882-9243) 

Read more at: Tax Times blog