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INSIGHTS ON TAX CRIMINAL PROSECUTIONS
July 15, 2008
Tax Analysts has a fascinating interview up ($link) with Paula Junghans, a criminal tax litigator and former acting assistant attorney general in the Justice Department Tax Division. A few of her insights:
You can read some of the old shelter cases that look a lot like the current shelter cases where no one even got assessed a penalty, and now suddenly we're talking about people going to jail for a long, long time....
Tax enforcement was moribund until 2002, as a result of the 1998 [Internal Revenue Service Restructuring and Reform] Act. It has picked up in the last five years.
...
The trick for prosecutors is to go after the right people for the right crimes and seek the right level of punishment. And I'm not convinced in any white-collar cases that these 15-, 20-, or 25-year sentences make sense at all. The public has a very short memory and will forget five years from now that anyone is still rotting in prison. And in my experience, white-collar defendants get it real fast.
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