Joseph Garza, 79, a Dallas-based tax attorney, was arrested and indicted last week on charges of attempting to hide $1 billion in client money and bilking the IRS of some $200 million in taxes due.
According to an announcement from Chad E. Meacham, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas, Garza allegedly created multiple tax shelters for his high-net-worth clients expressly to conceal funds from tax collectors. Specifically, he was charged with 18 counts of wire fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and 22 counts of aiding and assisting in the preparation of fraudulent income tax returns. He was arrested at his home and indicted the next day.
Meacham said that Garza’s schemes deprived the U.S. Treasury of some $200 million in taxes while “lining his own pockets in the process.”
Garza didn’t try anything that hadn’t been tried before. The indictment alleges that he created multiple shell companies—some dubbed services companies, others investment companies, but none of them operating as actual business organizations—to move money around and keep it off the IRS radar.
For these shell companies, Garza—along with unnamed others—purportedly invented fake operating agreements, service agreements, invoices, and annuity contracts—all phony—to give the appearance of legitimacy and with the express aim of fooling the IRS.
In addition, Garza is charged with preparing and filing sham tax returns for clients, deducting business expenses for services that were never performed and reporting fraudulent receipts for payments never received. He’s also alleged to have falsely deducted payments for annuities that didn’t exist, as well as underreporting clients’ incomes.
For these illegal activities, he is said to have charged clients a cut, a predetermined percentage of the shielded assets, according to the press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Texas, a division of the federal Department of Justice.
“Mr. Garza exploited his position as an attorney and purported tax expert to try and legitimize his illegal tax scheme,” said Christopher J. Altemus, Jr., special agent in charge of IRS criminal investigations in Dallas, in the press release. “His arrest should serve as a warning that individuals who create elaborate schemes that have no purpose other than to defraud the IRS and shift the tax burden to honest American taxpayers will be prosecuted.”
These are only charges, of course. He has yet to stand trial. But if convicted, prosecutors say Garza could face as much as 20 years in prison for each of the 18 counts of wire fraud, 20 years for conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and three years in prison for each of 22 counts of aiding and assisting in the filing of false federal income tax returns.
In all, that’s more than 40 federal charges and up to 86 years in prison.