tax fraud

A series of major problems and the whiff of potential fraud at a tax-prep company called "Mo Money Taxes" are a scary reminder: Be smart about selecting the professional who helps with your tax return. Here are some tips to help you avoid the shady characters.

Don't try this at home: The IRS has announced its annual list of tax scams to avoid. The list, referred to by the IRS as the "dirty dozen" tax scams, was recently published for 2011. Not surprisingly, in the wake of convictions in the UBS scandal, hiding offshore income topped the list of schemes...

California Attorney General Jerry Brown is suing eight current and former city executives from the town of Bell over ridiculously the absurdly inflated salaries they paid themselves, which they financed by overcharging Bell residents on taxes and fees.

German prosecutors raided all 13 Credit Suisse branches in the country on Wednesday as part of a probe into tax fraud. Earlier this year, German authorities acquired information on some 1,500 Credit Suisse customers who may have been using the Swiss accounts to avoid paying taxes.

As Tax Day creeps closer, tax refund scams are on the rise. A number of fake tax refund schemes have been made public in recent days, as the Justice Department appears to be stepping up enforcement. Just yesterday, the Justice Department announced that Idrissa Bassoum, formerly of Cincinnati, had...

While headlines in newspapers across the country today focus on the possibility that hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent claims may have been paid out under the first-time homebuyers tax credit, there's an even more a pressing matter regarding the credit that must be dealt with soon:...

If you've been hiding funds in offshore accounts, you now have until Oct. 15 to apply to the IRS for amnesty and avoid stiffer penalties. That's an additional 22 days from the original deadline of Sept. 23. So far, the amnesty program in 2009 has enticed 3,000 taxpayers to voluntarily admit they...

In answer to a lawsuit filed by the U.S. in federal court in Miami, UBS said it would not reveal the names of 52,000 American customers because that would require the bank to break Swiss law. UBS (UBS) told the court the U.S. lawsuit tramples on Swiss sovereignty by trying to enforce summonses from...

When consumers think about tax fraud, they typically think about the individuals who fail to report all their income or who take bad deductions. Many times the professional tax preparers themselves are forgotten, even though they can be willing participants in the fraud (and sometimes they're the...

Sharon Kukhan is known for selling a tax "decoder" scheme to help taxpayers avoid paying federal income taxes. She claimed she could "decode" the taxpayers' tax records to show that they were not required to pay income. Her system was based on the lie that clients did not have to pay income taxes...