Everything I have read says tax fraud.
This website says a lot about penalties and it seems that there are sentencing minimums - I don’t know if a judge or plea deal can go for less time than federal sentencing minimums. It also implies that doing the evasion multiple times (and how he did it) may work against him. Also it seems that paying the civil penalty does not enter into the criminal part. If I read it correctly, the government if they file against you expect you to pay both: criminal penalties with prison time and the civil penalties.
No, the sentence includes prison time, which is usually suspended if you agree and pay.
However-
The precise contours of the agreement may have had some flaws that seem unrelated to the alleged tax crimes at issue in the case, as perhaps correctly pointed out by the judge. But as someone with more than 30 years of experience for the IRS investigating the exact sorts of tax crimes of which Hunter Biden is accused, I can tell you very firmly: Biden did not get a sweetheart deal. In fact, not only would you not be going to prison if you did what Hunter Biden did, you likely wouldn’t even be charged.
The fact of the matter is no one goes to jail anymore for not paying their taxes on time, as much as the WSJ would like one to think they do.
and this-
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/18/politics/hunter-biden-irs/index.html
Thanks for the cites. I thought I was misremembering somehow, but they support what the experts were saying on places like MSNBC. You or I wouldn’t go to prison, in all likelihood, therefore neither should Hunter (in a just system). That was the gist.
There’s a discrepancy. Your cite says that 324 cases were referred to the sentencing commission in 2020. However, this cite:
says the IRS initiated almost 1600 cases, involving $2.3 billion in taxes. With those numbers, the average case would be about $1.4 million each. They cite their conviction rate as just over 90%, so that’s about 1,400 convictions that year. Why were only 324 referred to the sentencing commission?
Looks to me like about 75% of the cases never went that far, probably because of plea deals. Like the one that Biden agreed to, and was subsequently vacated.
An excellent point. And we DO need those statistics if we are to fairly consider the question of whether Joe might choose to pardon Hunter.
Yes, I could have been clearer. The distinction I was going for was pardons for convicted criminals whose convictions would be considered legitimate (for example, the three war criminals Trump pardoned)*–and pardons for convicted criminals whose convictions are not widely seen as being legitimate. Hunter might well fall into that latter category. The statistics you suggest would be important in determining this.
All convictions in all courts can be argued as being political if the arguer is bold enough, of course. But when the crimes are as well-documented as those of the war criminals, the argument becomes strained.
Joe definitely wouldn’t want to be seen as issuing pardons for Trumpish reasons such as ‘this guy is manly and I need to be seen as manly so I’m going to pardon him to associate myself with his manly actions of shooting down unarmed civilians’ and the like. Much less would Joe want to be seen as privileging his family members–something Trump obviously gloried in.
Trump grants clemency to troops in three controversial war crimes cases.
Right and most tax fraud cases are civil fraud, not criminal.
The 1600 number is for ‘investigations initiated’, not indictments or convictions. And they weren’t just investigations into tax fraud, but ‘other financial crimes’ as well.
The cite I gave is very direct. It specifically states that roughly 2/3 of people convicted of tax fraud did jail time, with an average duration of 16 months.
Do you think the U.S. Sentencing Commission is lying? Why are you trying to find another result by reading between the lines in other documents when you have a direct source stating the facts?
I think you need a pretty good reason to deny the numbers the U.S. Sentencing Commission itself states very clearly.
And according to their guidelines, Hunter would be a candidate for ‘enhanced’ sentencing, due to complicated financial shenanigans, foreign dealings, repeat offenses, prior criminal offenses, etc.
FWIW:
Hunter Biden took House Republicans to task on Wednesday, defying a subpoena for closed-door testimony and instead delivering a statement outside the Capitol decrying the party’s efforts to impeach his father, President Joe Biden.
Here’s another, older document (2016) from the USSC that has more details on sentencing:
Tax Fraud appears to be rather rare. Of the 67,742 cases the USSC looked at in 2016, only 584 were tax fraud cases.
I don’t know why paying the tax when caught would get you off the hook for fraud. It would be like not charging a bank robber because he returned the money when caught.
Sometimes the IRS will negotiate to drop charges or penalties for failing to file or other lesser tax offense if the subject pays up in full. But when you are charged with felony fraud, paying back the money won’t get you off the hook. It might result in a lighter sentence or some reduction, but The USSC doesn’t document amsingle case of sentence reduction for,pying the taxes back.
According to the document above, somewhere between 20% and 30% of convictions had a reduced sentence. But that still included jail time. The guideline minimums for tax fraud were 24-26 months, but the convictions averaged 14-18 months because of sentence reductions.
Here’s another cite, for 2015:
But here’s the reality: Very few taxpayers go to jail for tax evasion. In 2015, the IRS indicted only 1,330 taxpayers out of 150 million for legal-source tax evasion
That number seems consistent with the 1,400 in 2020.
Here’s another cite. The year is unclear, but this was published in 2019:
In a recent year, however, fewer than 2,000 people were convicted of tax crimes —0.0022% of all taxpayers.
Page 4 of this pdf says in 2022, there were 665 “tax crimes” referred for prosecution, resulting in 655 convictions.
So I’m pretty sure my numbers are mostly correct. There’s a disconnect here somewhere.
You conflated ‘tax evasion’ woth ‘tax fraud’. They are different things.
Again, my direct statement from the sentencing commission is better evidence than your interpretation of a document where you have to make assumptions, The USSC is a primary source, and they have a hard number showing exactly what percentage of people convicted of tax fraud went to jail.
Why do you doubt that number? Do you think they are lying? If not, what’s your explanation for the discrepancy between your assumption and their clear statement of fact?
Someone pointed out the disconnect earlier. Sam is providing a cite for tax fraud, which is tough to establish. You have to establish mens rea, that there was an intentional scheme to avoid paying taxes. Paying late, or not filing, etc., is not fraud. It’s evasion. So, if they’re charging Hunter with fraud, good luck establishing guilty intent with someone who was drug addled for that period (mentioned in one of the cites).
Not paying your taxes is not de facto tax fraud; more likely, it’s tax evasion. For the latter, if you pay your back taxes and fines, and promise to do better, it’s very unlikely you’ll get prison time.
ETA: Read the Slate cite DrDeth provided. Very helpful in explaining.
Hunter and his associates set up 20 different shell companies, one for each member of the Biden family. They then funneled money into those accounts in small amounts over time.
If they can’t provide a fiduciary reason for those shell companies, and if taxes weren’t paid on the money transferred around, then that’s about as bad as it gets for establishing intent to defraud.
Biden was accused of other tax crimes, but the current prosecutor let the statute of limitations run out on them before filing charges. I don’t know if evidence from those is admissable, or can affect sentencing.
Funny, this cite says the opposite.
https://www.findlaw.com/tax/tax-problems-audits/tax-evasion-and-fraud.html
Tax fraud is either pursued as a civil or criminal matter. Tax evasion is always criminal.
Tax evasion certainly can lead to significant jail time.
Everything I’m reading is saying tax evasion requires a willful act. What you’re calling “evasion” is negligence. Negligence can be the result of a mistake. Evasion is deliberate.
Hunter is being charged regarding his tax obligation, no one else’s. The shell company jive keeps coming up with nothing to substantiate that anything illegal occurred.
Perhaps I’m using the wrong term of art. I’m no expert. I’d encourage people to read the Slate cite, authored by a legitimate expert.
My opinion was, and is, that Biden should be treated as other similarly situated people were. If jail time is what typically occurs, then off to jail he should go (as I said earlier). But if jail is not typical, he shouldn’t do any time.
I hope the judge who gets his case applies the appropriate standards. If so, I’ll be satisfied. But I have to say, this thread (including my contribution) has done a good job of muddying the water, but it’s still not clear what the proper standard is.
Here’s another cite for tax evasion:
Let the furious google searching begin!
I strongly suspect that the differences between the cites that Sam is using and the ones that the other ones are using is that Sams are for those convicted of tax fraud and evasion while the other charges, while the ones the other are citing are what happens to people found to have been in Hunter Biden’s situation, and who are usually either never charged or are able to plead down to some other misdemeanor charge or as in Biden’s case delayed prosecution, and so don’t appear in Sam’s conviction statistics.
So both cites may be correct. Yes, in particularly bad circumstances, if you find someone who refused to play ball and accept a plea or who for some other reason you want to nail to the wall, after going to all the trouble of convicting them you probably want to hit them hard to make them an example to others. Further there may be cases where did something even worse but agreed to plea guilty to tax fraud in as a lesser charge. So in the cases where there is an actual conviction sentences involve jail time. But it could still be the case that most people who did what Hunter did don’t have their cases go that far, aren’t convicted of Tax evasion or fraud and don’t serve time.
If you want a specific example take Trump. His tax crimes are orders of magnitude worse than Biden’s with zero remorse. But the IRS and New York aren’t bothering with criminal charges. I guess Joe’s Justice department must be more in the tank for Donald than it is for Hunter.
I think this is right. 2/3rds of convictions result in jail time, not 2/3 of all cases.
Hunter could have had a plea deal. He had a pretty good one all lined up, but his lawyers went too far and tried to slide a blanket immunity for all prior crimes into the fine print on one of the charges, and the judge threw it out.