Free Republic

Lawyers for billionaire Beanie Baby creator and convicted tax cheat Ty Warner say he’s “a self-made man with a generous heart” and a federal judge was right not to send him to the big house. Prosecutors were left fuming in January after Warner was handed just two years probation and 500 hours community service for hiding $100 million in secret Swiss bank accounts to con the IRS. In February, they asked the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to order Warner be resentenced. But attorneys for the 69-year-old Oak Brook toy industry titan argued in a 57-page court filing Thursday...

An unusual number of physicians in several U.S. states are just finding out that they’ve been victimized by tax return fraud this year, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. An apparent spike in tax fraud cases against medical professionals is fueling speculation that the crimes may have been prompted by a data breach at some type of national organization that certifies or provides credentials for physicians. Scott Colby, executive vice president of the New Hampshire Medical Society, said he started hearing from physicians in his state about a week ago, when doctors who were just filing their tax returns began receiving notices from...

A new audit-report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) shows that the IRS sent at least 343 potentially fraudulent tax returns in 2011 to the same, single address in Shanghai, China, for a total of $156,533 in tax refunds. The same report also shows that 655 potentially fraudulent tax refunds totaling $220,489 were sent to the same address in Kaunas, Lithuania. Other potentially fraudulent refunds, 580 of them, were sent to the same address in Orlando, Fla.; 355 to the same address in Lakewood, Colo; and another 291 to another single address in Orlando, Fla. In total,...

The government on Tuesday authorized establishment of a committee that will examine ways to eliminate cash from the Israeli economy—the better to prevent citizens from cheating on their taxes. The committee will be chaired by Harel Locker, director of the Prime Minister’s Office. Cash is easily passed from individual to individual, and transactions using cash can take place without the tax man’s supervision. Not so electronic transactions; with modern computers, banks can keep tabs on how much people deposit into their accounts and how much they withdraw, while credit card companies have an up-to-the-second record of how much people spend....

WASHINGTON, D.C., August 5, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The General Accounting Office (GAO) will investigate every dollar of federal funding going to Planned Parenthood, as well as other organizations that support the liberalization of abortion laws, for potential fraud. The GAO will investigate the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), the Guttmacher Institute, the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), the Population Council, and Advocates for Youth. The “comprehensive” report will list every service performed and every federal dollar allocated, four Congressmen announced on Monday afternoon.

Rep. Jack Kingston has introduced a bill to stop illegal immigrants from receiving child tax credits saying the current system is "absurd" and riddled with fraud. In an exclusive interview with Newsmax TV, the Georgia Republican said the measure could save the taxpayer between $3 billion and $4 billion a year at a time when lawmakers are trying to find ways to decrease the size of the deficit. "What has happened is that illegal aliens have been given the right to claim child tax credit and it's so bad that one guy in Indianapolis was discovered he had claimed 20...

AUSTIN, TX - If Howard Antelis looks familiar, it's because he's the guy who blew the whistle on the IRS. "I'm horrified and ashamed and embarrassed by what I've seen," the veteran IRS tax examiner told 13 Investigates last summer. "We've been allowing the U.S. taxpayer to get robbed for years now... and we should all be outraged at what's going on." Antelis, along with a tax preparer in central Indiana, helped WTHR expose massive fraud involving the IRS. Eyewitness News discovered the federal agency had been giving away billions of dollars in improper tax credits to undocumented workers. Making...

A mother of three, who taunted authorities to catch her as she stole about $20 million from the IRS, has been jailed for 21 years. Rashia Wilson, who pleaded guilty to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft earlier this year, admitted to stealing more than $3 million but the figure is believed to be much higher. Tampa police were first alerted to the fraud in 2010 when they noticed a drop in drug dealing in the area.

The name “Mayors Against Illegal Guns” is well known as Mike Bloomberg’s gun-control arm, which he spends his personal fortune through on ads. Yet the group’s website is registered to, and handled by, official city government servers and staffers. Domain names for MAIG were registered in 2006 by the New York City Department of Information and Technology, and have remained on official city web servers ever since.Yet the group’s “action fund,” through which he has piped at least $14 million of his own money in ads over gun control this year alone, is registered as a 501c4, a nonprofit “social...

IRS Refunds $4 Billion Child Tax Credits Per Year to Illegal Immigrants Whose Kids Do Not Live in US

The State Department, under Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton, created an arrangement for her longtime aide and confidante Huma Abedin to work for private clients as a consultant while serving as a top adviser in the department. Connect with NYTMetro Follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook for news and conversation. Ms. Abedin did not disclose the arrangement — or how much income she earned — on her financial report. It requires officials to make public any significant sources of income. The disclosure of the agreement that Ms. Abedin made with the State Department comes as her husband, former...

I have a challenge for members of Congress now vowing that the federal government will enforce the immigration laws in the future if we just let them take the illegal aliens in the United States today and put them on a "pathway to citizenship." It is this: Investigate the employer who -- according to the Office of the Inspector General of the Social Security Administration (SSA) -- filed 37,375 inaccurate W-2s in tax year 2005. In fact, investigate all employers who have similarly filed massive numbers of bad W-2s. Forget the employers who filed 100, 200 or even 500 bad...

Court records show the new head of the North Carolina Democratic Party owes nearly $286,000 in back taxes and penalties. Pittsboro Mayor Randy Voller was elected party chair earlier this month, pledging to rebuild an organization still reeling from defeats at the ballot box in November.

Stealing IDs off the Internet has become easier than swiping candy from a convenience store. Consider the case of Rodney St. Fleur, who was recently charged with taking the names of 26,000 people from public databases, including prison inmates. He obtained their Social Security numbers through online LexisNexis research services at his employer’s law office in North Miami Beach, according to a search warrant. Authorities say some of St. Fleur’s information ended up in the hands of Frantz Pierre, a one-time North Miami gang member who was arrested at his seven-bedroom Parkland home last week. Pierre is accused of heading...

Law enforcement agents raided a house Wednesday and got a big break in their effort to stop a tax fraud epidemic, arresting people they say have been pioneers in creating and executing tax return fraud on a massive scale in the Tampa Bay area. The house is in the 10000 block of Dunscore Cottage Way in Wimauma. It's where authorities say they found a woman known on the street as the "first lady of tax fraud." She is 26-year-old Rashia Wilson, and investigators say she is considered an organizer and recruiter in many of the tax refund schemes that have...

A Charlotte, N.C., woman has been accused in a tax scheme to defraud the government of more than $3.8?million. In court documents filed Thursday in U.S. District Court, 40-year-old Candida Mayo Figueroa was named as a suspect. Federal authorities said the U.S. Postal Service intercepted an "extraordinarily large number" of mailings from the U.S. Treasury Department that appeared to contain checks going to several apartments close to one another in Charlotte. The Postal Service alerted investigators because the names on the mail were people not known to receive mail at those addresses. Authorities said much of the mail was sent...

IRS supervisors ignored employees who tried to warn agency higher-ups of fraud in a program designed to collect taxes from immigrants, resulting in the agency paying out potentially bogus refunds, according to an official audit released Wednesday. The Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration (TIGTA) said the IRS is too focused on getting out refunds quickly rather than getting them only to qualified taxpayers. Auditors also said the agency eliminated some methods employees had used to figure out questionable refund requests and doesn’t have the right training or tools to screen out bogus identity documents when immigrants apply for taxpayer...

WASHINGTON—The Internal Revenue Service may have delivered more than $5 billion in refund checks to identity thieves who filed fraudulent tax returns for 2011, Treasury Department investigators said Thursday. They estimate another $21 billion could make its way to ID thieves' pockets over the next five years. The IRS is detecting far fewer fraudulent tax refund claims than actually occur, according to a government audit that warned the widespread problem could undermine public trust in the U.S. tax system. Although the IRS detected about 940,000 fraudulent returns for last year claiming $6.5 billion in refunds, there were potentially another 1.5...

A Broward County woman was sentenced Thursday to nearly six years in prison for stealing the identities of U.S. Marines and others in a tax-refund scam designed to trick the Internal Revenue Service into sending her thousands of dollars. Dorothy Boulin, 29, of Coral Springs, plotted with a Marine from North Miami who allegedly supplied her with the stolen IDs of fellow Marines while he was stationed in Afghanistan, according to charges filed in federal court. (SNIP) According to the charges, Boulin used an electronic IRS number — typically issued to legitimate tax preparers — on her home computer to...

MEN OF HONOR Apparently, if you want to cheat on your wife or spurn the mother of your unborn child, cover up and easily settle your institution's criminal efforts to help Americans avoid paying their federal income taxes, or just avoid paying your own fair share, the place to be is on President Barack Obama's economic-recovery advisory board. Because that's where Robert Wolf, chief executive of UBS Group Americas, the U.S. arm of one of Switzerland's largest banks, UBS AG, sits, as do Charles E. Phillips, President of Oracle Corporation, Peter Orszag, the director of the Office of Management of...