The Woman Who Brought Down a Massive Tax Fraud Ring

[hue]

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2014/04/24/Woman-CEO-Who-Brought-Down-Massive-Tax-Fraud-Ring

Two years ago, a branch manager at Widget Financial, a federal credit union in Erie, Pennsylvania, began to get suspicious. He had been processing several account opening requests and thought it unusual that they had all come from distant New York City. At around the same time, a Widget vice president got a strange phone call from a New Yorker complaining that he had never opened an account with Widget, yet was receiving mail from the credit union.

The coincidental occurrence of two red flags was enough to catch the attention of Widget CEO Gail Cook, who ordered her information technology department to pull the details of every account from New York, Connecticut and Rhode Island that had been opened in the previous two years.

Cook had no idea that she had just taken the first steps in uncovering a massive tax fraud scheme that involved thousands of stolen identities, fake tax returns, and millions of dollars drained from the U.S. Treasury.

Cook said in an interview that as soon as the details from eight different accounts were put side-by-side, she and her employees began to see problems. “There was a lot of cut-and-paste type information,” she said. There were driver’s licenses with the same person’s photo and different names, and multiple names listing the same address. The next step was to examine account activity, and on some of the accounts, Cook said, there was nothing other than run-of-the-mill transaction activity. But others were different, with activity almost exclusively limited to money order purchases and payments to and from pre-paid credit card accounts.