Showing posts with label Return Preparers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Return Preparers. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 23, 2014

Tax Return Preparers Convicted of Conspiracy and Failure to File FBARs (12/23/14)

DOJ Tax announced in a press release, here, that David Kalai and Nadav Kalai, tax return preparers, were convicted by a jury of one count of conspiracy to defraud the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and two counts  of willfully failing to file FBARs.  Key excerpts are:
According to the second superseding indictment and evidence introduced at trial, David Kalai and Nadav Kalai were principals of United Revenue Service Inc. (URS), a tax preparation business with 12 offices located throughout the United States.  David Kalai worked primarily at URS’s former headquarters in Newport Beach, California, and later at URS’s location in Costa Mesa, California.  Nadav Kalai, who is David Kalai’s son, worked out of URS’s headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland, as well as the URS locations in Newport Beach and Costa Mesa.  David Almog was the branch manager of the New York office of URS and supervised tax return preparers for URS’s East Coast locations.  
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The second superseding indictment and the evidence introduced at trial established that the co-conspirators prepared false individual income tax returns that did not disclose the clients’ foreign financial accounts nor report the income earned from those accounts.  In order to conceal the clients’ ownership and control of assets and to conceal the clients’ income from the IRS, the co-conspirators incorporated offshore companies in Belize and elsewhere and helped clients open secret bank accounts at the Luxembourg locations of two Israeli banks, Bank A and Bank B.  Bank A is a large financial institution headquartered in Tel -Aviv, Israel, with branches worldwide.  Bank B is a mid-size financial institution, also headquartered in Tel Aviv, with a presence on four continents.  
As further proven at trial, the co-conspirators incorporated offshore companies in Belize and elsewhere to act as named account holders on the secret accounts at the Israeli banks.  The co-conspirators then facilitated the transfer of client funds to the secret accounts and prepared and filed tax returns that falsely reported the money sent offshore as a false investment loss or a false business expense.  The co-conspirators also failed to disclose the existence of, and the clients’ financial interest in and authority over, the secret accounts and caused the clients to fail to file FBARs with the U.S. Treasury.  \ 
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The evidence at trial established that David Kalai and Nadav Kalai each failed to file FBARs for calendar years 2008 and 2009 concerning a foreign account held at Bank A in Luxembourg.  The bank account was held in the name of a nominee corporation in Belize and held over $300,000. 
I think the banks are Bank Leumi and Bank Hapoalim, both Israeli banks.

Thursday, August 8, 2013

Cheating, Visibility and Return Preparers (8/8/13)

A new tax procedure blog, Procedurally Taxing, here, has a new blog entry written by Professor Leslie Book, here, titled Cheating and Visibility on Taxes: IRS Efforts to Regulate Tax Return Preparers Should Continue (Procedurally Taxing 8/6/13), here.

The blog entry opens with the following:
It comes as no surprise that people cheat on their taxes. There is a rich literature discussing tax noncompliance, analyzing its causes and discussing ways that the government can deter, detect and if necessary sanction those who would cheat or help others cheat. I too have contributed to the discussion, primarily considering the role that commercial preparers play in decisions to comply with our tax laws in research reports commissioned by the Taxpayer Advocate Service and made part of the National Taxpayer Advocate Reports to Congress in 2007 and 2008.
The blog entry then follows with some very interesting insight and research on cheating and how the findings of this research can be deployed by increasing visibility in tax settings.  I particularly commend to readers the Halloween research study.  Visibility is enhanced through information reporting and the IRS's return preparer initiatives, one facet of which is in play in the recent Loving case now on appeal to the D.C. Circuit.