A lawyer friend emailed me the following bit of history:
“And God said:
‘Let there be Satan, so people don’t blame everything on me.
‘And let there be lawyers, so people don’t blame everything on Satan.’”
— as told to George Burns
This is in the non-tax-related area of law:
I’m writing to tell you about – and invite you to come to – a free panel discussion (aka “Public Forum”) on a topic important to anyone who runs or wants to run a website or blog, and to lawyers who advise website owners or bloggers, or both.
A little more information: The forum is entitled:
“Click on the Dotted Line:
Internet Website Privacy Policies,
Terms of Use and Service, and Disclaimers —
Can all that stuff you never read actually hurt you?”
It’s taking place on Tuesday April 27, 2010 at 6 PM at New York County Lawyers’ Association (NYCLA), which is downtown, near City Hall, at 14 Vesey Street, New York, NY. NYCLA’s Cyberspace Law Committee is putting on this forum and I will be moderating it.
What’s it about? This forum will discuss the enforceability of website terms, good practices in developing those terms, as well as pitfalls for website owners, businesses, and their attorneys in identifying issues, developing policies, and drafting the “fine print” terms for websites.
Criminals who dress up as cops sometimes get a whole lot of crimes done. Similarly, internet email scamsters have been pretending to be the Internal Revenue Service for a while as well.
In this scam, a criminal sends an email which is supposed to look like it’s from the IRS. This fraudulent email asks you to click on a link to review your account, get a refund, or something, but the goal is actually to extract from your personal information, by which your identity can be stolen, or to commit some other nefarious crime which will only hurt you (like perhaps to take control of your computer and use it as a zombie bot which becomes an unwitting conduit for spam).
A religious leader in Vancouver, Washington has a lot of atoning to do for his less-than-spiritual relationship to material things and the lure of filthy lucre.
Until last September, Maximo Garza, 47, was the pastor for Victory Outreach Church of Portland, a non-denominational church which has operated in Portland, Oregon, for more than 15 years. Garza was sentenced to five months in prison for aiding the preparation of a false tax return.
During his plea hearing, Garza admitted he provided false expense invoices which purported to reflect public relations and other services provided by Victory Outreach Church to William Thompson, who was then operating a mail-order divorce service using the name Hallwood Inc.
Thompson used the false invoices to take expense deductions on tax returns filed by Hallwood in order to fraudulently reduce his tax liability. Thompson pled guilty to tax evasion and was sentenced to a prison term in 2007.
Between 2001 and 2003, Garza provided invoices reflecting a total of $735,441 in false business expenses. Thompson agreed to let Garza keep approximately 10% of the expense amounts.
Where are those scarce government resources going?
The Internal Revenue Service employs approximately 88,000 full time staff. This is two and a half times as many as the FBI.
Then, what about Spies v. Bean counters? Incomparable! The number of the CIA’s staff cannot “at present, be publicly disclosed.” So says cia.gov.
Marketing experts say that there are few words as powerful to persuade as “free.” One enterprising scamster took that concept and ran with it to steal unsuspecting taxpayers’ tax refunds.
While living in sunny San Diego, Maxim Maltsev of Russia, blended the persuasive power of the word “free” with the fact that the IRS has a free electronic tax return filing program, and harnessed the awesome reach of the Internet, to steal tax refunds owed to ordinary taxpayers, looking to get their returns prepared and filed as quickly, easily and cheaply as possible.
Maltsev admitted in federal court in California that he was part of a conspiracy to obtain federal income tax returns requesting refunds before they were electronically filed with the IRS.
The success of the scheme depended upon taxpayers being fooled into using apparently free electronic tax return filing services which were, in fact, fake.
The Associated Press reports that oral argument on Wesley Snipes’ appeal of his conviction on three misdemeanor charges of failure to file tax returns was heard by the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, in Atlanta today. See Wesley Snipes Appeals 3 Tax Convictions in Georgia. (http://sn.im/tc2fn)
The almost-overnight sensation of the IRS offshore account voluntary disclosure program is about to close.
After the deadline was extended three weeks ago, from September 23rd to October 15th (see https://pearlmanlaw.wpengine.com/irs-extends-voluntary-disclosure-deadline-for-secret-offshore-account/), the final deadline is now only days away. See also the New York Times article, “Tax Evaders Face Choice: Pay or Pray” by Lynn Browning.
While touting itself as a program by which taxpayers with unreported income in foreign bank accounts can “come in from the cold,” avoid criminal prosecution, and pay a penalty which is stiff, but not as severe as the penalties a taxpayer would be subject to outside the program, what seems to get lost in the discussion of this program is the fact that taxpayers who seek to participate are required to confess to a tax crime, waive their 5th Amendment right against self incrimination before knowing whether the Government will commit not to pursue criminal charges against them.
That is a danger of this program. Still, news accounts plus telephone conversations with IRS employees working in its criminal investigation division report that thousands of taxpayers are lining up to participate, submitting written disclosures in order to get that promise not to prosecute and the stiff but less horrible than otherwise penalty structure.
With 48 hours left before the final deadline to participate in a voluntary disclosure program designed get taxpayers with unreported foreign bank accounts to come back into the system and report their foreign income, the IRS has announced that it is extending the deadline from Wednesday September 23, 2009 until October 15, 2009.
The IRS reports that this extension was made in response to repeated requests from attorneys and other tax practitioners from all over the country.
In addition, an IRS agent working on a team evaluating the disclosures being submitted by taxpayers trying to participate in this program told me that there was a huge volume of submissions.
Within the guidelines of this program, taxpayers are given an opportunity to avoid criminal prosecution for tax crimes such as tax evasion and tax fraud.
Also, as part of this program, a taxpayer is subject to paying penalties on previously unreported income in foreign bank accounts under guidelines defined earlier this year, in March 2009. These guidelines are tough and expensive, but not nearly as tough or expensive as the sort of penalties a taxpayer would be facing if not working within this program.
The Internal Revenue Service flatly states about its own practices: “The IRS does not send taxpayers e-mails about their tax accounts.”
So, if your email in-box has a message saying that its from “Internal Revenue Service [no-reply@irs.gov]” with a subject line of “Notice of Underreported Income” you can know, from the start, that this message is a fake.
This message is apparently being sent to gazillions of email addresses.
The text of one I received today reads as follows:
Taxpayer ID: arp-0000174073547US
Tax Type: INCOME TAX
Issue: Unreported/Underreported Income (Fraud Application)
Please review your tax statement on Internal Revenue Service (IRS) website (click on link below):
review tax statement for taxpayer id: arp-0000174073547US
Internal Revenue Service
This is plainly a fake, and a scam, probably designed to steal the recipient’s identity, or install malicious software on the recipient’s computer.
Steve Ragan of The Tech Herald (thetechherald.com) reports that this bogus message is being sent out at a rate approaching 90,000 an hour, and that the goal of it is, in fact, to trick computer users to install malicious software onto their computers.
So the quick thought here: don’t fall for it, don’t click on the link in this bogus email which is designed to do harm.