Major fraud crackdown includes alleged $74M IRS scheme involving Mexican citizens

The Fraud Division's Tax Section brought an indictment in the Northern District of Georgia, charging three individuals with numerous crimes arising out of a seventy-four million dollar scheme to defraud the IRS. According to the indictment, the men, all Mexican citizens. Obtained Mexican IDs of third parties and used them to get IRS filing numbers. They filed fraudulent returns using those identities, and they allegedly received more than sixteen thousand U.S. Treasury refund checks totaling around seventy-four million dollars. Stolen identity refund fraud cases must be stopped. We must stand ready to protect our government's revenue sources from bad actors wherever they might live, and operate. Now, in addition to stealing from taxpayer-funded programs, fraudsters also target taxpayer dollars by criminally siphoning money from the Internal Revenue Service. Just last month, GAO estimated that taxpayers lose up to 304 billion dollars every year due to fraud schemes perpetrated against the IRS. We are actively combating those tax fraud schemes, and today, on the eve of the tax extension filing deadline of October 15th, we are announcing the first ever nationwide tax fraud surge. In the past 45 days, the Fraud Division's Tax Section and United States Attorneys' offices across the country participated in the National Tax Enforcement Surge. The surge of nationwide resources resulted in prosecutorial actions against 76 defendants in 45 days, whose alleged and proven crimes totaled an intended loss of over 490 million dollars. Those seventy-six prosecutorial actions in 45 days include new charges against 31 defendants, whose alleged schemes targeted approximately 350 million dollars in intended loss to the taxpayer. During this surge, we have also achieved two trial victories, dozens of other convictions through guilty pleas, and numerous sentencings of criminal fraudsters. The work completed has been a nationwide effort, with cases from Alaska to Maine to Florida to Minnesota and many states in between.