Tax Shelter Indictments

"Denis Field, who was chairman and chief executive of BDO Seidman from 1999 through late 2003, and before that led the firm's national tax practice, was charged with 22 counts in Federal District Court in Manahattan. Prosecutors are investigating the web of banks, law firms, accounting firms and investment boutiques that sold questionable tax shelters to wealthy individuals from the late 1990s through recent years. ... The indictments are the largest crackdown on tax shelter promoters since mid-2005, when the accounting firm KPMG reached a $456 million agreement with prosecutors and admitted to wrongdoing over its work with questionable shelters", Lynnley Browning at the NYT, 10 June 2009, link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/10/business/10tax.html.

A BDO partner showed me one of these shelters in 1999. I told him I didn't think it had substance despite what BDO's national office thought. So it goes.