Northern California Residents Indicted for Filing False Liens Against IRS Employees and Tax Fraud

The Justice Department announced today the unsealing of a superseding indictment returned by a federal grand jury in Sacramento, Calif., charging Teresa Marie Marty, Charles Tingler and Victoria Tingler, all of Placerville, Calif., with conspiracy to defraud the United States and filing multi-million dollar liens against government officials.

Marty is charged with filing liens against the property of three Internal Revenue Service (IRS) employees involved in the collection of taxes she owed the IRS.  She also filed liens of at least $84 million against the property of two Justice Department attorneys involved in a lawsuit filed against her in 2009 to enjoin her and her business, Advanced Financial Services (AFS), from preparing tax returns.

According to the superseding indictment, the Tinglers were clients of Marty and AFS, who filed a false tax return in 2008 fraudulently claiming a refund of $358,415.  The indictment charges the Tinglers, as well as Marty, with filing this tax return. When the IRS tried to collect the fraudulently obtained refund, both Mr. and Mrs. Tingler filed multiple liens against the IRS revenue officer who was handling their collection case.

According to the charging documents the liens disclosed the social security numbers of the respective government employees. Marty and the Tinglers are also charged with multiple counts of unlawfully using the social security numbers of the government employees in the liens they filed with the California Secretary of State.

Finally, the indictment charges Marty, Mr. Tingler and AFS office manager Pamela Harris, of Placerville with participating in a conspiracy to defraud the IRS.  The indictment alleges that as part of the conspiracy, Harris and Marty engaged a commercial collection agency to collect one of the three false liens that Mr. Tingler had filed, one of which was in the amount of $500,000.

Marty, Harris, and Marty’s daughter, Rebecca Bandera-Marty, had previously been indicted in June 2013 for a large-scale tax-fraud scheme. Those charges are included in this superseding indictment.  According to the superseding indictment, in 2008 and 2009 Marty, Bandera-Marty, and Harris conspired to file at least 250 false individual federal income tax returns on behalf of individuals who resided in twenty-six states, and which claimed more than $60 million in false federal income tax refunds.

An indictment is merely an allegation and all defendants are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.  If convicted, the defendants face up to five years in prison for the conspiracy charge as well as each charge of filing a false claim and unlawfully disclosing a social security number.  Each retaliatory lien count carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison.

The case was investigated by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration and by IRS-Criminal Investigation and is being prosecuted by Justice Department Tax Division Trial Attorney Ignacio Perez de la Cruz and Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Segal in the Eastern District of California.