Trump's week in review: $490M in tax fraud uncovered; USCIS to speed up termination of refugee status

4. DOJ says it uncovered more than $490M in tax fraud

During a press conference at U.S. Department of Justice headquarters in Washington, D.C., Wednesday, Colin McDonald, assistant attorney general for the National Fraud Enforcement Division, announced that the division’s tax section and U.S. attorneys’ offices nationwide had uncovered more than $490 million in tax fraud.

McDonald said the tax enforcement surge targeted “people who lied on purpose to take money that they knew did not belong to them."

He said they are "people who intentionally violated a known legal duty, people who invented refunds they were not entitled to, who stole other people’s names and filed returns using them thousands of times over, who built abusive and illegal sham trusts to bury income they knew perfectly well was taxable, who took Social Security and Medicare money out of their employees’ paychecks and kept it for themselves.”

“These are not errors," McDonald said. "These are criminal schemes built deliberately, run for years, designed to be hard to find and paid for every single time by the Americans who file taxes honestly and pay what they owe,” he said.

Jared Koopman, the IRS chief tax compliance officer and chief of Criminal Investigation, put the figure in perspective, saying $490 million “could support over 95 million school lunches, over 7500 [...] annual salaries for teachers or firefighters” and “over 60,000 Pell grants for students attending college.”

In a statement on the fraud investigation, U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche described “every dollar stolen through tax fraud” as “a dollar taken from the American people.”

“What we uncovered during this concentrated surge is only the tip of the iceberg,” he added. “The Department of Justice is committed to expanding our investigations and exposing schemes designed to evade accountability, because there is no safe haven for fraudsters.”