Software billionaire accused of hiding $2bn in income from IRS – potentially the largest tax scam in US history The US Justice Department on Thursday charged billionaire software tycoon Robert Brockman with tax evasion, wire fraud, money laundering, and other offenses. Brockman, 72, of Houston, Texas, and Pitkin County, Colorado, is the CEO of auto-dealership software maker Reynolds & Reynolds. He is alleged to have participated in a …
There are many factors that determine whether someone should get bail. I don't know this guy specifically, but a pension-age man with ties to the local community (family, residence, faith community, cat, dog...), no particular foreign connections (dual citizenship, property abroad, family abroad), and no prior history of breaching bail conditions who is accused of a non-violent offence ought usually to be in with a good shot at bail.
More generally, the US is in the midst of a very sensible movement away from cash bail. It effectively privatises the pre-trial monitoring system and it ends up with poor people and people of colour being banged up for bad reasons. Innocent people who can't afford bail are pleading guilty to avoid remand. People on remand are spending more time incarcerated before trial than their sentence would have been. It's madness.
See this about one third down: https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual-26-release-and-detention-pending-judicial-proceedings-18-usc-3141-et
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-activism/where-bail-funds-go-from-here
It's not the copy paper that has the encoding in it, that I'm aware, it's the printer that puts the itty bitty dots down.
That what they want you to think!
Actually, the yellow dots thing is well known: https://www.eff.org/issues/printershttps://www.eff.org/issues/printers
Certain papers are identifiable. The paper used for banknotes had specific identifying features that made it more difficult to reproduce, and I am sure a totalitarian regime could do similar for copy paper.
An easy technique would be to mix a small proportion of some artificial fibres in the paper, which could be a mixture of different types of fibre, different lengths and even different colours. There's enough variation to provide a simple encoding mechanism so each batch could have a unique identifying number, which could be extracted by microscopic analysis of the fibre content of the paper by someone in the know. Kind of variation of the theme of 'DNA water' used to mark high value objects.
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Having a lot of money seems to turn people paranoid. Unless your hobby is burning money a billion is near impossible to spend sensibly in a lifetime. But more often than not they turn into utter misers and spend more time and effort holding on to a couple of $ than it took them to amass their fortune.
Came to write the same thing.
Rich man, pay a token fine, no jail time, free to move on.
Poor person, 2 years on in hell hole prison because you can't afford bail, a plea bargain to admit to a lesser charge rather than risk overworked lawyer failing to prove your innocence (and another 6 months in prison waiting for trial). Then a criminal record that will ruin your life.
Welcome to the US legal system, the best money can buy.
In its early editions it was a great piece of software (distributed on magazine cover disks) - hence why the 3 letter agencies and forensic investigators tended to use it themselves but disliked job public using it. However, it then got revamped and received some very heavy-handed pushy and deceptive adware that made you think it was a vehicle for something unsavoury...
If you really need to clean a PC and not want stuff to come back to bite you, without wiping the HDD and starting over then tools such as Evidence Eliminator are a really useful part of the support toolkit. However, in saying that, I've not come across a publicly available tool that can clean all the system areas that rootkits etc. can hide - out of sight of Windows.
What does surprise me, is that given the age of EE (last version released in 2008) is that anyone is still using this software. Wouldn't want to use it on x64 OS's nor on anything more recent than W7/32.
The last few administrations have been defunding the IRS enforcement branch.
Odd really when it has a 50x payoff in the money it gets back.
Almost as if rich political donors don't want to be audited by the tax man
ps. He's back and is the poster boy for "there is no racism cos this guys rich". He did the stunt where at the graduation speech at a black university and announced he was paying off everyone's student loan. It was part of a deal he was trying to do with the IRS where he claimed that he had planned to give all the money away to charity - and it was just resting in his anonymous swiss bank account
"Odd really when it has a 50x payoff in the money it gets back."
Same in the UK
20,000-odd benefit fraud investigators finding a few tens of millions of pounds of fraud at most (mostly perpetrated by department employees)
1200 Inland revenue investigators chasing BILLIONS
It's a big business worldwide: $11 TRILLION uncovered last year
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-oecd-tax/governments-sharing-bank-details-uncover-11-trillion-in-offshore-assets-idUKKBN241129
> IRS investigators are very efficient and thorough.
They may well be but, from the fine article:
> He is alleged to have participated in a two-decade-long scheme to hide $2bn in income from the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
So 20 years to catch and charge him, and then only after a tip off.
His employees shredded incriminating evidence, destroyed electronic media, and yet, with all these precautions, the IRS still knows what's in the emails, the codenames of the accomplices and probably much, much more.
Next time the FBI wants to crack an iPhone, instead of once again whining publicly for Apple to put in a backdoor, I think it should call the IRS for help.
That said, given that every time the FBI has whined about Apple, in the end it still proclaims that it got results without the backdoor, so maybe they already do.
I guess the guy who turned witness for the prosecution kept copies of the mails so he could hand them over to the IRS if things went south?
As others have noted he had been doing this for 20 years and squirrelled away $2 billion. If he had not been as greedy and stopped after a couple of hundred million he could be happily retired in Mexico now sipping cocktails on the beach and the IRS would be none the wiser. Instead he now faces the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison
Instead he now faces the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison
Do you really believe that? With that kind of money, he can make a court case so expensive it becomes prohibitive and the IRS knows that as well, so he'll admit to a lesser amount, pays a hefty fine and promises to never do it again.
"I guess the guy who turned witness for the prosecution kept copies of the mails so he could hand them over to the IRS if things went south?"
25 years ago my wife was working as a receptionist for a local business. When the boss discovered she could do bookkeeping she asked her to look after the business accounts. Wife didn't like what she saw but needed the job. Thinking that, in the event of a tax inspection, the boss would just point to "the dopey girl that does the books getting it wrong" she created a parallel but "correct" set. When the taxman did come calling, incredibly they gave a few days notice so there was time for the boss to burn a mountain of evidence. The taxman wasn't fooled. As expected, the finger was pointed at my wife who was able to be very helpful to the investigators...
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