Eddie Ray Kahn is an American tax protester.[1] Kahn is currently in prison for tax crimes, with a tentative release date of 2026.[2][3] Kahn founded the group American Rights Litigators and ran the for-profit businesses "Guiding Light of God Ministries" and "Eddie Kahn and Associates." According to the U.S. Justice Department, all three organizations are or were illegal tax evasion operations.[4]
On October 12, 2006, Kahn was charged, with actor Wesley Snipes and Douglas P. Rosile,[5] with one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States under 18U.S.C.§371,[6] and one count of making or aiding and abetting the making of a false and fraudulent claim for payment against the United States, under 18U.S.C.§287 and 18U.S.C.§2.[7]
Kahn went to Panama after the 2006 indictment, but was arrested and returned to the United States for the trial. During much of the trial, Kahn remained in his jail cell, refusing to participate and claiming that the court had no jurisdiction.[3] News reports indicated that Kahn "has no legal training but insists on representing himself and has made several missteps and peculiar motions. For example, he sought to be immediately freed because the indictment lists his name in all capital letters, and he claimed U.S. attorneys have no jurisdiction because Florida supposedly was never ceded to the federal government".[8] These motions were denied.[9]
On February 1, 2008, Kahn was found guilty on the charge of conspiracy to defraud the government and on the charge of making or aiding and abetting in the filing of a false claim.[10] Wesley Snipes was found guilty on three misdemeanor counts of failing to file Federal income tax returns. Douglas P. Rosile was convicted on the conspiracy and false claim charges.[11][12]
On April 24, 2008, Kahn was sentenced to ten years in prison.[13]
Although already in prison, Kahn was indicted with four other persons on September 3, 2008, on charges of mail fraud, conspiracy to commit mail fraud, and conspiracy to defraud the United States. The indictment was handed down by a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C. The indictment charges that Kahn conspired to sell schemes based on deliberate misrepresentations of the legal basis of the U.S. tax system.[14]
On May 26, 2010, Kahn was found guilty of conspiracy to defraud the United States and conspiracy to commit mail fraud as well as one count of mail fraud,[15] in connection with the sale of worthless "bills of exchange" for the purpose of impeding the Internal Revenue Service and promoting other schemes to orchestrate tax fraud. Kahn was accused of manufacturing over $1 billion in fictitious financial instruments purporting to be drawn on the U.S. Treasury. Others found guilty in the affair were Stephen C. Hunter, Danny True and Allan J. Tanguay. On August 30, 2010, Kahn was sentenced to twenty years in prison on these convictions.[16]
Eddie Kahn is incarcerated at the Rivers Correctional Institute, a federal facility at Winton, North Carolina. As a result of his latest convictions, his scheduled release date was changed from July 18, 2015, to April 21, 2026.[2] Douglas Rosile was incarcerated at the Federal Community Corrections Office at Cincinnati, Ohio, and was released on June 1, 2012.[17]
↑ WWW.USDOJ.GOV US Department of Justice News Release JUSTICE DEPARTMENT FILES SUIT TO STOP ALLEGED NATIONWIDE TAX SCAM - Florida Man Sells Counterfeit Checks And Other Scams With Help From Florida Lawyer And Texas Accountant published December 8, 2003
↑ According to the Court docket, the original indictment apparently had been handed down on April 5, 2006, but had been sealed.
↑ Where the victim is the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the purpose is to defeat the lawful functioning of the IRS, a section 371 conspiracy is called a "Klein conspiracy," after the case of United States v. Klein, 247 F.2d 908 (2d Cir. 1957), 57-2 U.S. Tax Cas. (CCH) paragr. 9912, cert. denied, 355 U.S. 924 (1958).
↑ Stephen Hudak, April 24, 2008, "Wesley Snipes sentenced to three years in federal tax case," Orlando Sentinel, at Archived 2008-07-24 at the Wayback Machine .
↑ News Release, "Five Promoters of Tax Defiance Scheme Indicted for Tax Fraud," Sept. 10, 2008, U.S. Dep't of Justice, at .
Wesley Trent Snipes is an American actor and martial artist. Snipes has made films in a variety of genres, such as numerous thrillers, dramatic feature films, and comedies, though he is best known for his action films. He was nominated for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Male for his work in The Waterdance (1992) and won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor for his performance in the film One Night Stand (1997).
The U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey is the chief federal law enforcement officer in New Jersey. On December 16, 2021, Philip R. Sellinger was sworn in as U.S. Attorney. The U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey has jurisdiction over all cases prosecuted by the U.S. attorney.
Arthur L. Farnsworth is an American politician and convicted tax protester. Evidence found by the government in Farnsworth's case helped the government indict actor Wesley Snipes on tax charges.
Diane Lynn Kroupa is an American attorney who served as a federal judge of the United States Tax Court from 2003 until 2014. Kroupa previously was the Chief Judge of the Minnesota Tax Court. Following her criminal conviction in U.S. District Court for a tax-related crime, she was sentenced to 34 months in prison. She has since been released from prison.
A tax protester, in the United States, is a person who denies that he or she owes a tax based on the belief that the Constitution of the United States, statutes, or regulations do not empower the government to impose, assess or collect the tax. The tax protester may have no dispute with how the government spends its revenue. This differentiates a tax protester from a tax resister, who seeks to avoid paying a tax because the tax is being used for purposes with which the resister takes issue.
Tax protesters in the United States advance a number of conspiracy arguments asserting that Congress, the courts and various agencies within the federal government—primarily the Internal Revenue Service (IRS)—are involved in a deception deliberately designed to procure from individuals or entities their wealth or profits in contravention of law. Conspiracy arguments are distinct from, though related to, constitutional, statutory, and administrative arguments. Proponents of such arguments contend that all three branches of the United States government are working covertly to defraud the taxpayers of the United States through the illegal imposition, assessment and collection of a federal income tax.
James Galante is an American convicted felon and associate of the Genovese crime family, owner of the defunct Danbury Trashers minor-league hockey team and a defunct racecar team fielding cars for Ted Christopher, and ex-CEO of Automated Waste Disposal (AWD), a company that holds waste disposal contracts for most of western Connecticut and Westchester and Putnam counties in New York.
The 861 argument is a statutory argument used by tax protesters in the United States, which interprets a portion of the Internal Revenue Code as invalidating certain applications of income tax. The argument has uniformly been held by courts to be incorrect, and persons who have cited the argument as a basis for refusing to pay income taxes have been penalized, and in some cases jailed.
The redemption movement is an element of the pseudolaw movement, mainly active in the United States and Canada, that promotes fraudulent debt and tax payment schemes. The movement is also called redemptionism. Redemption promoters allege that a secret fund is created for every citizen at birth and that a procedure exists to "redeem" or reclaim this fund to pay bills. Common redemption schemes include acceptance for value (A4V), Treasury Direct Accounts (TDA) and secured party creditor "kits," collections of pseudolegal tactics sold to participants despite a complete lack of any actual legal basis. Such tactics are sometimes called "money for nothing" schemes, as they propose to extract money from the government by using secret methods. The name of the A4V scheme in particular has become synonymous with the movement as a whole.
Bradley Charles Birkenfeld is an American private banker, convicted felon, and whistleblower. During the mid- to late-2000s, he made a series of disclosures about UBS Group AG clients, in violation of Swiss banking secrecy laws, to the U.S. government alleging possible tax evasion. Known as the 2007 "Birkenfeld Disclosure", the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced it had reached a deferred prosecution agreement with UBS that resulted in a US$780 million fine and the release of previously privileged information on American tax evaders.
Honest services fraud is a crime defined in 18 U.S.C. § 1346, added by the United States Congress in 1988, which states "For the purposes of this chapter, the term scheme or artifice to defraud includes a scheme or artifice to deprive another of the intangible right of honest services."
McNally v. United States, 483 U.S. 350 (1987), was a case in which the United States Supreme Court decided that the federal statute criminalizing mail fraud applied only to the schemes and artifices defrauding victims of money or property, as opposed to those defrauding citizens of their rights to good government. The case was superseded one year later when the United States Congress amended the law to specifically include honest services fraud in the mail and wire fraud statutes.
Happy's Pizza is an American regional chain of restaurants, serving pizza, ribs, chicken, seafood, sandwiches, pasta and salad.
A case of Medicaid fraud was carried out in 2010 by an Armenian-American organized crime group called the Mirzoyan–Terdjanian organization. The scam involved a crime syndicate which created 118 fake clinics in 25 states and used stolen medical license numbers of real doctors and matched them to legitimate Medicare patients whose names and billing information were also stolen. The group submitted more than $163 million in claims and received $35 million of that before they were caught. Prosecutors charged 73 individuals in several states with allegations of racketeering conspiracy, bank fraud, money laundering and identity theft.
Under the federal law of the United States of America, tax evasion or tax fraud is the purposeful illegal attempt of a taxpayer to evade assessment or payment of a tax imposed by Federal law. Conviction of tax evasion may result in fines and imprisonment. Compared to other countries, Americans are more likely to pay their taxes on time and law-abidingly.
The Swiss investment bank and financial services company, UBS Group AG, has been at the center of numerous tax evasion and avoidance investigations undertaken by U.S., French, German, Israeli, and Belgian tax authorities as a consequence of their strict banking secrecy practices.
Conspiracy against the United States, or conspiracy to defraud the United States, is a federal offense in the United States of America under 18 U.S.C. § 371. The statute originated under a federal law enacted in 1867 that was codified in the Revised Statutes of the United States in 1874, in a subsequent codification of federal penal statutes in 1909, and ultimately in the United States Code in 1948. The crime is that of two or more persons who conspire to commit an offense against the United States, or to defraud the United States.
Brian Kolfage is an American far-right political activist, former United States Air Force airman, and convicted fraudster. He co-founded We Build the Wall, a private organization that purportedly aimed to construct a privately funded barrier on the Mexico–United States border; he pleaded guilty in 2022 to federal fraud and tax crimes for defrauding donors to the group.
In 2019, a scandal arose over a criminal conspiracy to influence undergraduate admissions decisions at several top American universities. The investigation into the conspiracy was code named Operation Varsity Blues. The investigation and related charges were made public on March 12, 2019, by United States federal prosecutors. At least 53 people have been charged as part of the conspiracy, a number of whom pleaded guilty or agreed to plead guilty. Thirty-three parents of college applicants were accused of paying more than $25million between 2011 and 2018 to William Rick Singer, organizer of the scheme, who used part of the money to fraudulently inflate entrance exam test scores and bribe college officials. Of the 32 parents named in a Federal Bureau of Investigation affidavit filed in U.S. District Court in Boston, more than half had apparently paid bribes to have their children enrolled at the University of Southern California (USC).
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
