May 9, 2017

A former Internal Revenue Service (IRS) revenue officer who is a resident of Greensboro, North Carolina, was sentenced to serve 43 months in prison for tax evasion and corruptly endeavoring to impede the due administration of the internal revenue laws, announced the Justice Department’s Tax Division. According to documents filed with the court, from 1989 through 2014, Henti Lucian Baird operated HL Baird’s Tax Consultants. Baird had previously worked as an IRS revenue officer for 12 years. Although Baird filed tax returns every year, he has not paid taxes since at least 1998. He used his knowledge and experience as a revenue officer to evade paying his own taxes. He hid hundreds of thousands of dollars that he earned from his consulting business in bank accounts that he created in the names of his children and used money orders and cashier’s checks to pay his personal expenses. In response to IRS collection efforts, he submitted a false collection form on which he claimed to have only one bank account and concealed the existence of his nominee accounts. When Baird learned that the IRS had become aware of these accounts and intended to levy them, he withdrew the funds before the IRS could seize them. To stall impending liens and levies and evade paying the taxes he owed, Baird filed, in bad faith, a cash offer in compromise to settle his tax debt, a request to discharge the levies on the nominee accounts and an application to subordinate his federal tax lien. During this time when Baird was refusing to pay over to the IRS the taxes he duly owed, Baird continued to pay the mortgage on his 4,300 square-foot home, annual fees for his timeshare in Florida and car payments on his BMW. DOJ

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