Word: frauded
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Only later did Koutchesfahani realize it was a farewell present. "They were polite people who shared Sam's problems and told him that things would be all right--that God would work things out," says Koutchesfahani's lawyer Milt Silverman. Koutchesfahani had a checkered past, having pleaded guilty to fraud and tax evasion. "There was nothing goofy about them. There was nothing wacky about a spaceship following a comet. They were Christians. I guess they kept their true beliefs hidden from the world." Well, not entirely. Silverman says one of them mentioned they had come to Earth "as angels...
Frazier Todd Jr., a flimflam man from Atlanta, sussed out the IRS's inability to detect fraud. Todd obtained Social Security numbers from dozens of Atlanta women who lived in public housing projects. He then secured employer IDs from the IRS (making him look as if he were hiring them) and transcribed both numbers onto W-2 forms that he used to prepare electronic returns. Todd filled in an income for these women and a figure for taxes withheld that was high enough to kick back a generous refund. Todd then took the returns to banks to obtain "refund anticipation...
...every 10,000 nonfilers ever get caught. Not filing is known as noncompliance, small beer to the IRS. "We eat $200 billion a year in unpaid taxes," says Representative Bill Archer, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, which oversees the IRS. "All of that is fraud." The IRS's computer problems, he says, "open the door to more and more fraud...
Open the floodgates, he should say. While you've been fussing over itemization, less solid citizens have been pillaging the IRS, having discovered that the agency can't catch them. The foundation of fraud detection is what professionals call "information matching"--reconciling all the information supplied by the taxpayer (including Social Security numbers) with the information on W-2s and 1099 (miscellaneous income) forms, not to mention investment income and bank transactions. The antiquated IRS computer system is apparently unable to do this in a timely way, or sometimes to do it at all. Fraud happens between those stovepipes...
This year the IRS asserts that it has a more comprehensive fraud-detection system up and running for electronic filing. The agency will not say exactly what the new system does, though it is thought to be able to provide sophisticated "matching" across various computer networks...