About a decade ago, an American lawyer with roughly $50 million stashed in the Cayman Islands went looking for another place to hide it. His problem, allegedly, is that he had never declared the accounts and paid his taxes. His solution was to purchase nearly a dozen villas in Spain through shell corporations, plus millions of dollars’ worth of gold bullion.
The lawyer might never have come to the attention of U.S. tax authorities if not for the fact that the person he had hired to help him load up on Spanish real estate blew the whistle. In 2016, with the aid of a former IRS agent named Robert Mazur, that person handed over detailed documentation of the alleged tax evasion scheme to the IRS whistleblower office.
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That was nearly seven years ago. To this day, the IRS has yet to take any enforcement action.
“It defies logic to me that it could take that long,” Mazur said. But that is less than the average amount of time it takes the IRS whistleblower office to investigate a claim, which ranges from eight and a half to more than 11 years.
“The IRS whistleblower program is one of the greatest wastes of government opportunity that’s out there,” said Jeffrey Neiman, who represents whistleblowers as a partner at the Florida law firm Marcus, Neiman, Rashbaum & Pineiro. “You have this stubbornness within the IRS where they believe they should be able to do everything on their own. Despite Congress giving them this amazing tool to crack down on tax evasion.”
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