August 9, 2016

A Franklin, Tennessee, man was sentenced to 48 months in prison for engaging in an extortion and wire fraud scheme involving former presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s tax returns. Michael Mancil Brown, 37, was found guilty at trial on May 12, 2016 of six counts of wire fraud and six counts of using facilities of interstate commerce to commit extortion. U.S. District Judge Billy Roy Wilson of the Eastern District of Arkansas, sitting by designation in the Middle District of Tennessee, imposed the sentence and also ordered Brown to pay $201,836 in restitution to PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. According to testimony at trial, evidence recovered from a computer seized from Brown’s residence in 2012 implicated Brown in a scheme to defraud Romney, the accounting firm of PricewaterhouseCoopers and others by falsely claiming that he had gained access to the PricewaterhouseCoopers internal computer network and had stolen tax documents for Romney and his wife, Ann D. Romney, for tax years prior to 2010. DOJ

Tagged in: Tax Fraud,