Four Ernst & Young Partners Charged With Conspiracy
Published May 30th, 2007
Four current and former Ernst & Young LLP partners were charged today with conspiracy and other crimes for peddling abusive tax shelters to the accounting firm’s monied clients, the latest advance in the government’s largest-ever tax fraud investigation.
Ernst, one of the nation’s four biggest audit firms, apparently has avoided criminal charges, but high-ranking officials, including three lawyers, face more than a decade in prison if they are convicted.
Authorities singled out Robert Coplan, former director of Ernst’s Center for Wealth Planning and a onetime official at the Internal Revenue Service; Martin Nissenbaum, who leads Ernst’s Personal Income Tax and Retirement Planning Practice; Richard Shapiro, a tax partner; and Brian Vaughn, a former tax partner.
Each of the men worked in an Ernst unit known as VIPER, an acronym for Value Ideas Produce Extraordinary Results. They helped wealthy individuals slash or eliminate taxes they owed by creating off-the-shelf tax products that brought Ernst millions of dollars, government lawyers said.
Three of the men employed a tax shelter in 2000 to evade their own taxes, according to Michael J. Garcia, the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York. In all, that shelter helped the three men and eight other Ernst executives skirt nearly $4 million in tax liability, the government said.
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