IRS Employee Stole Data To Forge $8M In Fraudulent Returns 151
coondoggie writes "A former Internal Revenue Service employee this week got 105 months in prison for pleading guilty to theft of government property and aggravated identity theft in a case where the guy tried to get away with nearly $8 million in fraudulent tax returns. The U.S. Department of Justice said Thomas Richardson used his inside knowledge of IRS operations to commit his crime, which was pretty audacious. According to the DOJ, Richardson admitted that within a two-day period, April 15 to April 17, 2006, he filed or caused to be filed 29 fraudulent 2005 individual income tax returns totaling $7,922,657."
In America... (Score:5, Funny)
In America...
you tax IRS!
Obvious answer.... (Score:2)
Crucify him!
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Send him to Gitmo!!! He's obviously an Terrorist Evildoer(tm) bent on destroying the American Economy!!!
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Send him to Gitmo!!! He's obviously an Terrorist Evildoer(tm) bent on destroying the American Economy!!!
Haven't you heard? There's a Democrat in the White House, so Gitmo and the drone strikes are no big deal [washingtonpost.com].
Re:Obvious answer.... (Score:5, Funny)
Oh. I was going to say "Does he have internet access in prison? Can slashdot interview him?". But crucifying is probably more humane...
Cheaters (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Cheaters (Score:5, Informative)
I have a big problem paying taxes the way they are.
The IRS can go straight to hell. Nowhere else in America are you guilty till proven innocent and due process does not exist. You can be put in jail with all of your assets seized, which greatly inhibits your ability to defend yourself. Unless they really do charge you criminally, you are not provided with a defense in a case where you already guilty.
Add to this the fact that the average IRS is a fucking retard when it comes to accounting, tax laws, corporate structures, etc. and they still have the ability to outright destroy your ass with their ignorance, in many cases with no oversight or accountability .
I speak from experience. When you are in an oil and gas state and you can get some arrogant sociopathic retarded fucktwat from several states away who thinks he knows about your industry better than accountants and regulators and incorrectly over charges you millions, it might piss you off. Just a little.
Fought it in court viciously for over 9 years at the cost of nearly a million dollars. In the end, other people in the IRS were finally brought in to audit it, and lo and behold, they were wrong the whole time.
Made those fuckers pay interest and on the wall in the office is a framed check from the IRS for well over 7 million dollars.
Rot In Hell.
I am not surprised at all by this. Not even the slightest. What I am surprised about is that they don't catch them doing it more often.
IRS needs to be completely razed to the ground and a new system put into place. No wonder I am big huuuuuggge fan of taxing consumption and not wealth. Not only is it passive to citizens, but a hell of lot easier to understand. Disagree with me for sure, but that fucking group of psychopaths needs to be taken care of.
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Re:Cheaters (Score:5, Insightful)
tired of progressive taxes and really would prefer taxes to be regressive
Nice straw man there. No, not regressive. Flat. Telling half the people in the country that they don't need to pay income taxes is no way run a civil society. Not if they still get to vote, anyway.
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Consumption taxes are inherently regressive
No, they are inherently flat. Or, are you saying that a person who earns $50k a year is going to pay (for example) $1 in sales tax on package of toilet paper, but a rich guy is only going to pay $0.50 when he buys it? Does the rich guy get a discount on his toilet paper sales tax because he just paid a big pile of sales tax when he bought the fancier car, or services from a more expensive wedding photographer?
Or are you thinking of a sales tax as an income tax, and you're calling it "regressive" because
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So it doesn't bother you that poor people pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes?
You mean right now? They do not, because they don't pay any income taxes. Do you mean in flat tax scenario? No, it doesn't bother me any more than the fact that they also continue to pay (as they do now) a higher percentage of their income for shoes and socks, would also pay a higher percentage of their income for the services of a plumber, and would pay a higher percentage of their income for the services of their government. This is also true if you compare somone making $100k a year to someone making $2
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So, let's talk about what you're really complaining about: you don't like the fact that some people make more money than other people.
No, I think those who make more money should pay an equal or higher percentage of their income in taxes. You clearly disagree. In fact, I think that you are a moron for thinking that poorer people should pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes. Life has already given them a harder time without the government needing to pile on too.
Fortunately your ideas are not going anywhere politically. Unfortunately, ideas like yours give flat tax a bad name, because people associate it with regressive sales t
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I think that you are a moron for thinking that poorer people should pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes.
I don't. I think they should pay exactly the same rate on the dollars they earn as everyone else. But since you insist on looking at it in terms of their overall cash pulled in, rather than as a function of each dollar earned ... do you think it's fair that a set of tires costs poorer people a greater portion of their annual income? Be specific.
I think those who make more money should pay an equal or higher percentage of their income in taxes
Which is it? Address the scenario I described. Should we two people, working the same job and generating exactly the same pay from that job, get different amounts
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Except that there's nothing regressive at all about a flat tax. It's flat.
If poor people pay a higher percentage of their income as taxes, then it's regressive, even if you choose the name 'flat'. Sorry if you're too dumb to pick up that idea.
Please provide your moral reasoning for making the guy who works an extra twenty hours a week subsidize (through paying a higher rate per dollar) the lower tax rates of the guy who chooses to work only forty hours a week. Be specific in your justification for taking more of each dollar that the harder worker earns.
Do you understand how tax brackets work? Both people pay the same amount of tax on the first part of their income.
My point is consumption taxes are regressive. My point wasn't that all other tax systems are fair.
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If poor people pay a higher percentage of their income as taxes, then it's regressive
How is paying 10% of your income regressive (relative to someone else, who makes more, who also pays 10% - but a lot more dollars)? You're still not being the least bit clear on this. 10% is 10%. A regressive tax rate would be a higher number the less you make.
Do you understand how tax brackets work?
Yes, though you seem to be avoiding the topic. If you work harder and make more money, more of every dollar you make is taken as taxes. That is a progressive tax system. The rate per dollar of income goes up as a function of the number of dollars yo
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How is paying 10% of your income regressive (relative to someone else, who makes more, who also pays 10% - but a lot more dollars)?
That's not regressive. It's not what I said, either. I said, "If poor people pay a higher percentage of their income as taxes, then it's regressive." Which IS regressive.
Yes, though you seem to be avoiding the topic. If you work harder and make more money, more of every dollar you make is taken as taxes.
No, you are wrong. Check it out [wikipedia.org]. In the US, no one pays any taxes on the first $5,800 they earn. It doesn't matter how much they make, the first $5,800 are tax free. That is the first bracket (because of the standard deduction). After that, the next bracket they pay 10%, etc. No wonder you are confused.
What absurd sophistry. There is no "part" of your income. You pay based on your entire annual earnings. Period. The guy who worked the extra hours pays a higher rate.
Are you always so adamant about things
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I said, "If poor people pay a higher percentage of their income as taxes, then it's regressive."
You keep saying that, but you keep skipping over pointing out the part where anyone has proposed a higher income tax rate for someone making, say, $20k a year than for someone making $55k or $250k a year. In what scenario, current or proposed, are you seeing anyone propose such higher (than someone else pays) income tax rates for lower income people?
Poor people tend to spend all of their money just to survive (or because they don't know how to save). Which is why they have a higher burden, as a percentage of their income.
What are you referring to, here? The services they pay for in the form of, say, natural gas service to heat their apartment? The costs of getting a haircut? T
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You keep saying that, but you keep skipping over pointing out the part where anyone has proposed a higher income tax rate for someone making, say, $20k a year than for someone making $55k or $250k a year. In what scenario, current or proposed, are you seeing anyone propose such higher (than someone else pays) income tax rates for lower income people?
You retard, do you not understand this? Do you constantly go around making yourself look like an idiot? Every sales tax in the world is regressive to some degree. It is easy to imagine why, although I have never met anyone who has as much trouble as you, figuring this out. Are you one of those people who has an IQ of 80? There must be some here on slashdot. Maybe you're just a troll.
Can you not imagine a 10% sales tax scenario, where someone makes $20k, spends all their money, and thus pays $2k in taxes
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What - specifically, in real numbers - is your standard of fairness for a sales tax, if not to apply it evenly, thus collecting more from people who consume more? And more to the point, why are you s
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And more to the point, why are you so desparate to avoid the main issue, which is that all the costs of life, including taxes, are - by your use of the word - regressive when someone make less cash?
Life is hard, and unfair, but that doesn't mean the government needs to pile on and make it worse. Have you figured out how tax brackets work yet?
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Have you figured out how tax brackets work yet?
Yes, they work to make it so that next week, when you work harder than you did this week, more of each dollar you make is taken and used to pay someone else's share of the cost of having a government that everyone uses.
Life is hard, and unfair
And so your solution is to make two people who are standing right next to each other doing the same job pay different taxes on a given dollar the earn, because one of them also works a second job?
that doesn't mean the government needs to pile on and make it worse
Don't you see that that is exactly of what you seem to approve? The system you like - the one
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when you work harder than you did this week, more of each dollar you make
No, you are wrong. Your first dollar will always be taxed at the exact same rate, no matter how much you make. That is how tax brackets work.
Sorry, if you refuse to learn, this conversation is useless. I also strongly suggest you read this [lhup.edu], and make every attempt to avoid the same mistakes the cargo cults made.
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No, you are wrong. Your first dollar will always be taxed at the exact same rate, no matter how much you make. That is how tax brackets work.
This is factually incorrect, and you know it. At the end of the year, when you actually file your taxes, you pay the higher rate for all of the money you earned, if you earned enough to put you in the higher bracket. Of course you know this, but you're pretending not to for some inexplicable reason.
Your taxes are based on the totality of your earnings. And if you earned a lot later in the the year, you'll also be fined for not having payed more in taxes early in the year. But again, you know this, much
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This is factually incorrect, and you know it. At the end of the year, when you actually file your taxes, you pay the higher rate for all of the money you earned, if you earned enough to put you in the higher bracket. Of course you know this, but you're pretending not to for some inexplicable reason.
Are you always this dumb? Check it out [wikipedia.org]. "Essentially, [tax brackets] are the cutoff values for taxable income — income past a certain point will be taxed at a higher rate." I mean, this is something basic research could have shown you.
Are you also one of those people who believes that if you go up a bracket, your after-tax income could be less? Because that can't happen. Are you in some non-US country where tax bracket means something different?
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income past a certain point will be taxed at a higher rate
That means that your income is taxed at a higher rate. When you go past the threshold, the number of cents taxed per dollar of all of your income will be higher when you sit down to file your taxes. Go ahead, fire up a copy of TurboTax, and run some numbers. Watch what happens. When you slip into the next bracket, your tax rate goes up, and the bottom line is that more pennies per dollar for all of your income are now taxed.
And just in case you're curious why peop
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Having an employer offer you more money shouldn't leave you poorer. A tax code that works in that way is insane... but that's exactly how it shakes out in some places.
I'm sorry Maryland is dumb. That was sad for you. That's not how federal taxes work, though.
Re:Cheaters (Score:5, Informative)
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What do these poor people spend their money on that they'd be paying more in taxes? Food from groceries is exempt from taxes in many areas, as is clothing below a certain amount. Why couldn't other necessities be added to the list in a consumption tax system?
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This has happened in every place I know of that has tried it.
Re:Cheaters (Score:4, Interesting)
A wealthy person only spends a tiny fraction of their income.
And when they do, it's on stuff that is taxed much more aggressively than things like rent, food, and utilities. The rich guy is also paying, usually, mammoth amounts of property tax, and will usually have a very large chunk of his assets gobbled up as a death tax.
If you're worried about percentages, why aren't you proposing that all of the other things in life - not just the cost of having a government - are also "regressive" in the way you've chosed to describe things? A bag of chips at the store is also regressively priced, relative to income, isn't it? Outrageous! Unfair!
Unfortunately, you're an idiot. (Score:2)
First, the oft-touted "47% of tax units pay no income taxes" statistic is wrong. 47% of tax units may not pay the Federal Income Tax, but any of them with any wage income at all DO pay the Federal Payroll Tax of 15.3% on every dollar earned up to about $100k. That's a tax on income.
That's a higher tax rate than the very wealthy pay on their investment / dividend / carried interest income.
As a matter of fact, I personally pay a federal tax rate of about 29%, double the tax rate paid by Mitt Romney.
Most peo
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I personally pay a federal tax rate of about 29%, double the tax rate paid by Mitt Romney
You're pretending that he didn't already pay the higher income tax rate on the money he earned and then risked in the investments that, if/when then make money, are once again taxed at the capital gains rate.
If you're really paying the rate you say you are, then you're making a tolerable living. Do you really have no investments of any kind? No 401? No IRA? Are you proposing that taxes are raised on such things? Maybe that's a good idea, since most of those dollars come out of your paycheck before you p
No, I'm not pretending. (Score:2)
You're pretending that he didn't already pay the higher income tax rate on the money he earned and then risked in the investments that, if/when then make money, are once again taxed at the capital gains rate.
Mitt Romney NEVER paid the higher income tax rate. His initial earnings were as carried interest paid at the capital gains rate; he NEVER paid the regular income tax rate on those earnings.
So, first problem, you're wrong.
Second problem:
If "putting your money at risk" for some reason deserved a lower ta
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In the real world, wealth is passed on.
Only after it has been substantially taxed. Regardless, your image of a cadre of cartoon-like rich-kid tax-evading villains is completely at odds with where most "rich" people come from. All of those Eeeevil people that the left says are the source of the deficit (by virtue of being under-taxed) are mostly dual-income professional families who did earn their way into Hated Rich People territory by making over $250,000 year.
But if it will make you feel better, how about we line up everyone who makes a mi
Re:Cheaters (Score:4, Interesting)
i didn't know there were that many people living on capital gains.
OK, so you hate people who've risked money making investments. We get that. But do you really think everyone else is so stupid to think you're saying anything of substance? Roughly 50% of the population earns money below the rate that the Congress has set as meaning they owe incomes taxes, and many of them receive "refunds" on money they don't even pay. They don't pay income taxes, they pay negative income taxes. A small number of rich people pay the vast majority of the country's income taxes, and middle class people pay the bits that are left over. The other half of people pay none. Of course you know that, and you're a troll.
Re:Cheatersincludes (Score:2)
OK, so you hate people who've risked money making investments. We get that. But do you really think everyone else is so stupid to think you're saying anything of substance? Roughly 50% of the population earns money below the rate that the Congress has set as meaning they owe incomes taxes, and many of them receive "refunds" on money they don't even pay. They don't pay income taxes, they pay negative income taxes. A small number of rich people pay the vast majority of the country's income taxes, and middle class people pay the bits that are left over. The other half of people pay none. Of course you know that, and you're a troll.
That 50% figure is dramatically misleading. First, it includes things like high school and college students who work part time and earn a pittance. And it also includes retirees who are not in the workforce. You can argue that even those people should pay income taxes, but the perception of a permanent 50% underclass that never pays taxes is absurd. Most taxpayers will not pay income taxes at both the start of their career and after retirement. I can't find the cite now, but I remember reading that sim
Re:Cheaters (Score:4, Informative)
Consumption taxes are not inherently simpler than income taxes. The core reason behind conservatives arguing constantly for a flat consumption tax is that they are tired of progressive taxes and really would prefer taxes to be regressive. It has very little to do with the IRS or your plight.
I had a back and forth, about taxes, in another thread with a /.er whose rebuttal was
"The founding fathers didn't institute a progressive income tax"
The fact is, consumption taxes (and/or tariffs) were enough to support the Federal Government's expenditures for the first ~85 years of its existence.
Now, a universal flat tax is just a massive giveaway to the richest Americans and a massive taking from those least able to afford it.
Not even Hermain Cain's 9-9-9 survived as a universal flat tax. [wsj.com]
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Consumption taxes are not inherently simpler than income taxes
- I am just going to respond to this, the rest I won't touch with you.
Consumption taxes are not just 'inherently simpler' than income taxes, they are infinitely simpler for the consumers.
What does one have to do to file taxes? At the minimum buy a software package and install it on a computer (so must own and operate a computer) and then go over forms, but this means having to pull out various papers collected over the year (or more than one year), receipts, statements, payslips, etc.
Otherwise all of that
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You are right to say that a flat sales tax is simpler than a progressive income tax (and probably that was what the OP was talking about). I just want to point out that consumption tax can, indeed, be more complex than income tax. If you implement a consumption tax similar to Canada's "Goods and Services Tax", everything is taxed at every stage through the process. It is impossible for the consumer to know what percentage of the price is tax.
Here is an example. A farmer produces wheat and sells it to a
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If you implement a consumption tax similar to Canada's "Goods and Services Tax", everything is taxed at every stage through the process. It is impossible for the consumer to know what percentage of the price is tax.
- it is a compound tax, but to the consumer every step in the process does not matter, the simplicity of not bothering with collecting all of the papers over the year and then having to FILE a tax form and not really knowing what is going to happen - will you really owe a tax or be paid something back or will you really be audited and then you are on a 'black list' for at least 4 years, and they will go over the last 7-8 years of your tax returns and your spending, receipts, etc. This is a nightmare.
Compa
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Correction:
... but on production side they would still be untouched and the government couldn't grow based on percentage of their production and work, only on percentage of what they are willing to spend on taxable goods.
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If you implement a consumption tax similar to Canada's "Goods and Services Tax", everything is taxed at every stage through the process. It is impossible for the consumer to know what percentage of the price is tax.
Here is an example. A farmer produces wheat and sells it to a distributor. The distributor pays 10% flat tax. The distributor then sells the wheat to a mill. The mill pays 10% tax (including 10% of tax that the distributor paid). The mill sells flour to another distributor. The distributor pays 10% tax (including 10% of the tax that the mill paid), etc.
GST is not a compound tax, it's a value added tax. Every bill that I pay gets split into two accounts - a "GST paid" asset account and an expense account. Every invoice I collect is split to a revenue account and a "GST collected" liability account. At the end of the period, I simply remit the difference between the two GST accounts.
Here's my example. Let's say a white box supplier buys $400 worth of components and sells me a $500 computer. They collect $25 GST from me, pay $20 to their supplier, and rem
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"no deductions"? So you run a business, hire a few people, pay their salaries and can't deduct their salaries from your revenue before showing the profit?
Can't deduct business expenses against revenue?
Ha! Under those conditions nobody would ever run a business.
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. Even a progressive income tax isn't really more complicated. ..
I stand by my initial assertion.
- well, you are free to stand by your totally wrong assertion, it's your business.
Collecting papers over the year and having to FILE taxes at the end and then having to battle against IRS and having possible jail time and fines .. NONE OF IT is an issue with consumption tax.
You come to a store - it's in the price. The only people that can make a mistake are owners of the store and 90% of population are not owners of stores.
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Again, if individuals do not have to file any papers, do not have to keep track of any papers, it immediately is INFINITELY easier for them than having to do any of it.
Store is a business. They already have to keep track of their paperwork just to know what's going on in the business, keeping track of accounting, receivables, payables, everything, taxes are a small part of what stores do anyway for profit.
People do not do accounting like that for profit, they only do any of it because the government forces
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I really love that you keep trying to compare a mythical consumption tax with an actual tax system, too. I've gotten to work with real world sales taxes before, and they aren't all that you guys crack them up to be. I've worked at a small rural ISP (10 or so employees), an
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You're too subtle for me. Stop beating about the bush and tell us how you really feel!
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"Nowhere else in America are you guilty till proven innocent and due process does not exist."
I think you're remembering yesterday's America, before the Patriot Act.
This is bullshit (Score:1)
I bet he won't be punished NEARLY as bad as the megaupload guy. Such bullshit.
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Steal hundreds of billions ...
I object to your terminology here. That's called "tax", not "steal". ~
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Oops - I guess I should have made it clear that I was referring to that "other tax" - the wall street bailouts. My bad!
Trickle-down doesn't work, you'd think the government would realize trickle-up doesn't either.
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Don't worry, I'm not a libertarian; and I got the idea just fine. It was just too tempting to not poke fun at it that way.
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I bet he won't be punished NEARLY as bad as the megaupload guy. Such bullshit.
How can you get so angry at something you speculate is going to happen?
But there's no need to bet, it's in the fucking summary. 105 weeks in prison, after a guilty plea. The megaupload guy is fighting it, which means he might get off entirely, or they might slam him, so the two sentences won't be comparable.
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105 MONTHS in prison, not weeks. Just a bit shy of 9 years.
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It really never ceases to amaze me.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Why is it that you so rarely hear about crimes where the feds haven't been able to actually figure out who actually did it?
They get greedy. (Score:2)
Say they stopped at $6 million. That is enough to get a new false identity or move to a country without extradition. After watching Top Gear I'd settle on Vietnam. Looks beautiful and friendly and has no diplomatic or extradition treaties.
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After watching Top Gear I'd settle on Vietnam. Looks beautiful and friendly and has no diplomatic or extradition treaties.
Everywhere looks "beautiful and friendly" when you've got a massive production team running around making sure everything goes smoothly (and an editing team for when things don't).
Re:They get greedy. (Score:4, Insightful)
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The article isn't too explicit on the details, but it sounds like he used his position and expertise to identify 29 people who were [dumber: weren't] eligible but didn't file [dumber: yet] for substantial tax returns. Then, he used the data
Re:It really never ceases to amaze me.... (Score:5, Interesting)
This is the perfect crime for an early season of the Sopranos, which featured several episodes where "degenerate" businessmen engaged in acts of crime they couldn't refuse. One involved an executive at an HMO, another involved a sporting gear franchise. Difference is that the screenwriters probably weren't bold enough to make this one up.
David Rose on the Moral Foundations of Economic Behavior [econtalk.org] in which he discusses his new book by that title.
From the very loose transcript (my emph.):
By the time you start rationalizing about the diffuse nature of the victim, moral laxity is already half-way up the flag pole.
David Rose knows your type:
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> Nobody got hurt.
Hmm. I cheated once at school and it almost wrecked my future. I wasn't caught, and it sent me on a path that I wouldn't have gone down if I hadn't have cheated. I was taking a Chemistry exam aged 14 and due to overcrowding, the exam was in a regular classroom rather than the gym. The assistant music teacher was running the show and as he had really bad eyesight it was just too easy to look through books in my bag for answers. A month later, the results came out and I hit 90% - almost t
financial crimes often go unreported (Score:5, Informative)
1. a lot of financial institutions would rather not it be public knowledge that they have problems in their security systems, etc. they try to hush things up without getting the cops involved.
2. the cops sometimes will collude with them to hush things up. see 'The Asylum' by Leah McGrath Goodman and NYMEX (yes, NYMEX from Trading Places)
3. at the highest echelon, the notion of what is legal and illegal gets distorted and fooled with, by lobbyists, payed-for intellectuals, and the super rich. so that to date there has been little-to-no prosecution of the people in the CDO, mortgage securities, robo signing, foreclosure fraud, and housing bubble system. experts and authors like Roger Lowenstein spill buckets of ink trying to prove that no crime took place, even though 2 trillion dollars magically disappeared into hedge funds and investment banks offshore accounts in 2008, with the help of the taxpayer.
4. take number 3 and just ... multiply it. well. did you know, for example, that the guy who ran Nymex was, directly before he ran Nymex, the head government regulator of Nymex? And that he let Nymex do stuff that it shouldn't have been doing, and then they hired him out of his government job and gave him a huge raise? there are thousands of cases like that that never receive media attention.
in other words, people DO get away with that sort of thing, all the time.
and the best way to get away with it is to have something like 'CEO' or 'Board Chairman' on your resume.
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FWIW, being a lowly anonymous coward: I worked for large multinational bank, and low-level petty thieves in the system (trying to cash checks under stolen identities, steal money orders, etc.) are *always* dismissed without police prosecution. Furthermore, this is widely known amongst employees, some of whom attempt to take advantage of the PR-shy policy. But there are massive amounts of checks and balances between multiple departments and heavy security to try to guard against loss as much as possible, ma
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It's naive to think that having most prosecutions convicted means most occurrences even get prosecuted.
Most crimes of this type never get caught. Heck, no one even finds out they happened in the first place.
Re:It really never ceases to amaze me.... (Score:4, Insightful)
You know, there is never just one cockroach...
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Dumb plan (Score:4, Informative)
According to the DOJ, Richardson admitted that the tax returns were prepared without the authorization of the 58 taxpayers listed on the tax returns. All of the returns directed that the IRS pay the money to one of Richardson's bank accounts.
I imagine a red flag was automatically triggered by the 58 returns going to one bank account. As a side note, I know people who write code for the Federal government that checks for irregularities like this and they do that for a living 40 hours a week, so if you're going to try to scam the IRS you have to be at least a little clever.
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The red flag might have been a single employee doing a particularly large (or small) number of returns or returns of the wrong general value, in a 2 day period. Granted at 59 returns it's 130k per return, but that would mean this guy happened upon 59 filings from the top 1% of wage earners (the top 1% in the US now is around 300k/year in income so for 2005 tax returns paying out 130k should be relatively rare, unless you work on those, and if you work on the ones with big money I'd expect you to get more
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I wonder if there's a hole there (Score:4, Insightful)
So I wonder what aspect of "insider knowledge" he used? Logins and passwords? back doors? social engineering? test accounts? phone numbers to helpful clerks that don't think about what they're being asked to do? secret URLs?
Is there a back door that anyone with similar "insider knowledge" can use, that's not a hole that's closable with say a simple password change? (has the hole been closed?)
Re:I wonder if there's a hole there (Score:5, Funny)
According to your sig, you also work for the Federal government, so you'd better be careful asking such questions!
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Modded Interesting? Thanks for the karma, but I don't really need it, and it was a *joke* (all good jokes have some element of truth of course).
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IRS uses the SenSage log data storage & analysis product: http://sensage.com/content/customers
Having used this product I'm sure the IRS will have all they need to track his electronic footprints outside the normal bounds and scope of his work. Unfortunately we'll never know.
IRS (Score:2, Offtopic)
What this agent did was actually a minor correction of the fraud and crime that IRS is involved with on the daily basis. [slashdot.org]
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A little typo: I don't mean to imply that identity theft is a 'correction' of the IRS fraud, only that what IRS does on daily basis is fraud [slashdot.org] and this guy is just a small part of that entire fraudster operation.
Eight million dollars?!?!? (Score:5, Funny)
Wow. That's like... four illegal downloads!
News for nerds. (Score:2)
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The thrust of the article is actually about the privacy concerns the IRS has, and this is the sort of thing that can go wrong. So it is topical, if you look past the summary.
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What is the tax rate on ill-gotten gains? (Score:3)
The best would be some sort of crime that pays off after the statute of limitations, and you only have to pay the lower capital gains rate. Win Win Win!
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Launder the money through a car wash. If you don't know how to do that... Better Call Saul.
Re:If the IRS accepts your taxes on crime... (Score:5, Interesting)
...isn't that implicit approval that what you did was legal?
No, that's implicit approval that you didn't also commit tax evasion.
The rulings are pretty self-consistent. You can even deduct the expenses for your illegal business:
"While embezzlers, thieves, and the like are forced to report their ill-gotten gains as income for tax purposes, they may also take deductions for costs relating to criminal activity. For example, in Commissioner v. Tellier, a taxpayer was found guilty of engaging in business activities that violated the Securities Act of 1933.[7] The taxpayer subsequently tried to deduct from his gross income the legal fees he spent while defending himself.[8] The Supreme Court held that the taxpayer was allowed to deduct the legal fees from his gross income because they meet the requirements of 162(a).[9], which allows the taxpayer to deduct all the “ordinary and necessary expenses paid or incurred during the taxable year in carrying on a trade or business.”[10] The Court reasoned (and the Internal Revenue Service did not contest the point) that it was ordinary and necessary for a person engaged in a business to expect to have legal fees associated with that business, even though such things may only happen once in a lifetime.[11] Therefore, the taxpayer in Tellier was allowed to deduct his legal fees from his gross income, even though he incurred the fees because of his crime. The Tellier court reiterated that the purpose of the tax code was to tax net income, not punish unlawful behavior.[12] The Court suggested that if this was not the case, Congress would change the tax code to include special tax rules for illegal conduct.[13]" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_of_illegal_income_in_the_United_States [wikipedia.org]
What a smarty (Score:1)
105 months = 8.75 years so $914,285/year (Score:2)
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Thomas Richardson was quoted as saying:
"I must have put a decimal point in the wrong place or something. Shit. I always do that. I always mess up some mundane detail."