SAN DIEGO – A jury found a doctor and his wife who made up to $1 million a year from their osteopathic medical practice guilty of not paying taxes, according to authorities.
The federal jury on Tuesday returned guilty verdicts after a two-week trial against Dr. James Francis Murphy and his wife, Denine Christine Murphy of not paying the U.S. Internal Revenue Service hundreds of thousands of dollars of income taxes they owed from the operation of their medical practice in Encinitas, California, and Omaha, Nebraska, officials said.
The couple will be sentenced on Sept. 12.
Evidence presented at trial showed that despite earning as much as $1 million a year from their osteopathic medical practice, the Murphys paid almost no federal income taxes for a decade.
“The Murphys have found out that the old adage is true: Nothing is certain but death, taxes and prosecution if you don’t pay your taxes,” U.S. Attorney Laura Duffy.
Officials said despite repeated warnings from the IRS, the Murphys filed false income tax returns for the medical practice using a bogus “trust,” filed false personal income tax returns that concealed their true income, and in certain years simply refused to file required tax returns at all.
The Murphys engaged in a variety of schemes to thwart the United States’ attempts to correctly assess and collect these taxes.
These schemes included:
- Falsely claiming that they were not citizens of the United States.
- Frivolously claiming that the federal tax laws did not apply to them.
- Fraudulently presenting fictitious documents such as “Private Offset Discharge and Indemnity Bonds” and “Bonded Promissory Notes,” purportedly worth hundreds of millions of dollars, as payment on their tax obligations.
- Fraudulently claiming that the hundreds of thousands of dollars they paid to credit card companies, utilities and other vendors were actually withholdings of federal income taxes, thereby entitling them to over a million dollars in refunds from the IRS.
The defendants even claimed that then-Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson was their “fiduciary” and was responsible for paying their taxes, officials said.
Erick Martinez, Special Agent in Charge of IRS Criminal Investigation’s Los Angeles Field Office commented, “James and Christine Murphy’s use of a sham trust served no other purpose than to hide the income they earned from the medical practice. Their filing of false tax returns and false claims of payment to the IRS were tax elimination tactics, used to further promote their criminal activities.”