News & Events

On December 4, 2023, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that it had entered into a $122.9 million settlement with Swiss private bank Banque Pictet et Cie SA (Banque Pictet). According to the DOJ’s press release, the settlement comes after Banque Pictet admitted to “conspiring with U.S. taxpayers and others to hide more than $5.6 billion in 1,637 secret bank accounts in Switzerland and elsewhere and to conceal the income generated in those accounts from the IRS.”Read More

A report from the federal Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC) estimates that Employee Retention Credit (ERC) fraud may have cost taxpayers more than $2 trillion since 2020. According to the PRAC, flaws in the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) processing procedures allowed thousands of fraudulent credit filings to go unnoticed initially. Now, however, the IRS is seeking to hold fraudulent filers accountable—and it is diverting resources from processing new claims to examining previously-filed claims for signs of fraud.Read More

The Employee Retention Credit (ERC) was one of several pandemic-era relief programs that proved to be a prime target for fraud. Pandemic-related fraud has cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars, with an estimated $8 billion in losses resulting from fraudulent ERC claims. As a result, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and other federal authorities are prioritizing ERC fraud enforcement heading into 2024. Here, Washington D.C. tax lawyer Kevin E. Thorn, Managing Partner of Thorn Law Group, explains what business owners need to know.Read More

A federal court recently ordered Payward Ventures Inc. and its subsidiaries, which operate the Kraken cryptocurrency exchange, to comply with a “John Doe” summons issued by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in 2021. This is the second time a federal court has ruled in favor of the IRS in its efforts to obtain customer information from Kraken, and while the court’s ruling limits the scope of the summons, it still compels Kraken to turn over customers’ personally identifying information and transaction histories.Read More

On October 19, 2023, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced a process for businesses to withdraw their Employee Retention Credit (ERC) claims. The announcement comes just over a month after the IRS placed a moratorium on new filings due to concerns about widespread ERC fraud. Washington D.C. tax lawyer Kevin E. Thorn, Managing Partner of Thorn Law Group, explains what business owners need to know:Read More