WTF.. dont ever appear on TV even if you doing it for charity! In the fall of 2006, he and two other ultra-marathoners took on an almost unimaginable challenge: they ran across the Sahara Desert, something that had never been done before. The run took 111 days, and was documented in a film financed by Matt Damon, who served as executive producer and narrator. Mr. Engle received $30,000 for his participation. The film, âRunning the Sahara,â was released in the fall of 2008. Eventually, it caught the attention of Robert W. Nordlander, a special agent for the Internal Revenue Service. As Mr. Nordlander later told the grand jury, âBeing the special agent that I am, I was wondering, how does a guy train for this because most people have to work from nine to five and itâs very difficult to train for this part-time.â (He also told the grand jurors that sometimes, when he sees somebody driving a Ferrari, heâll check to see if they make enough money to afford it. When I called Mr. Nordlander and others at the I.R.S. to ask whether this was an appropriate way to choose subjects for criminal tax investigations, my questions were met with a stone wall of silence.) Mr. Engleâs tax records showed that while his actual income was substantial, his taxable income was quite small, in part because he had a large tax-loss carry forward, due to a business deal heâd been involved in several years earlier. (Mr. Nordlander would later inform the grand jury only of his much lower taxable income, which made it seem more suspicious.) Still convinced that Mr. Engle must be hiding income, Mr. Nordlander did undercover surveillance and took âDumpster divesâ into Mr. Engleâs garbage. He mainly discovered that Mr. Engle lived modestly. In March 2009, still unsatisfied, Mr. Nordlander persuaded his superiors to send an attractive female undercover agent, Ellen Burrows, to meet Mr. Engle and see if she could get him to say something incriminating. In the course of several flirtatious encounters, she asked him about his investments. After acknowledging that he had been speculating in real estate during the bubble to help support his running, he said, according to Mr. Nordlanderâs grand jury testimony, âI had a couple of good liar loans out there, you know, which my mortgage broker didnât mind writing down, you know, that I was making four hundred thousand grand a year when he knew I wasnât.â Mr. Engle added, âEverybody was doing it because it was simply the way it was done. That doesnât make me proud of the fact that I am at least a small part of the problem.â
Snooping IRS agents are checking out everybody, keep a low profile by all means! I want [and do not expect to ever see it] a sales tax and dissolution of the income tax, not to mention legalization of all drugs. A sales tax brings in money from anybody that buys anything. That means that criminals will pay their taxes, workers will pay their taxes, everybody will pay their taxes pretty muchly... everybody will have an equal share in the tax payments for government and will then oppose bigger government. Point of sale terminals can do the math, the reporting, all of it.... that will set the stage for the exit strategy for the War On Poverty [complete failure to date btw] and the War On Drugs [complete failure btw].. I was in the war on Drugs actually, not on the police side though... I can tell you that it is a joke, the barbarians are massing at the southern border and have taken a LOT of California and the southwestern states... Arizonians that live within 50-60 miles of the border can't leave their houses for even a few hours, the drug guys take them over!! Meanwhile these piece of krap socialists [socialism is melting down worldwide btw, did anybody notice that?] that we have in office just seem to want things to be the way they are and seem to employ psychological denial as their first line of defense...
On the other hand, you could look at it that a tax cheating guy got caught by a smart agent, thus your taxdollars at work.... Most of the time you guys are bitching that the IRS is going after the small fish...
That's taxpayer money being spent to catch tax cheats on a bad idea of a tax... what a waste! Mozillo is my hero... the Jimmy Carter/Bill Clinton types saw to it that loans were mandated to people that could not repay them, and they enforced those regulations, Treasury People, at taxpayer expense, audited the lenders to see that they were meeting their quota of bad loans!! So Mozillo types discovered that they could take the loans off the books in the form of derivatives and make more bad loans and get paid a tremendous amount for their brilliant efforts as well.. and they played it to the hilt, I like to think that they were representing my thinking with regard to Clinton/Carter and telling them to shove it so far sideways that it gave them blurry vision... the barbarians weren't at the gates in that scenario, they were inside the compound, taking no prisoners and collateral damage be DAMNED...
Disgusting. Civil matters should not be treated criminally except in the most dire and egregious of cases.
wow ....doesn't say much for the guys attorney....it never ceases to amaze me ....the inequities in our legal system.