A former Internal Revenue Service agent has been sentenced to one year in prison, supervised release for one year and a $10,000.00 fine for carrying out a scheme to obstruct the IRS by fraudulently using net operating losses (typically generated from the operation of a business) to offset his personal income tax liability and for attempting to sell those same losses to other individuals or, what I often call, trafficking in losses. The defendant, Mr. Harry Wilner of New Jersey, was sentenced in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (Lower Manhattan).
Apparently, Wilner was a "team leader or coordinator" in the Large and Mid-Size Business Division of the New York branch of the IRS and he worked and supervised the audits of large financial institutions. Wilner's scheme went like this: Wilner served as a corporate officer of NIA Advertising, Inc a company that he used to generate a loan of $849,000.00 to another company, Royal Magazine, Inc. where Wilner also held a position. The "loan" it seems never existed, but the effect of recording the loan, and assumedly, repayment of the loan, on the books of those two companies generated losses and of those losses, Wilner claimed some for himself and like all good criminals, got even greedier, and tried to sell some to others. Implied, but not reported, was that Wilner probably communicated the fact of his IRS employment to those from whom he received monies in exchange for the losses, again probably implying that he had some control over audits by virtue of his position. Good stuff, huh.
John M. Hanamirian
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