Would the Proprietors of “I Married an Idiot” Commit Tax Fraud?

Sometimes you can’t make this stuff up.

Perhaps you missed the website imarriedanidiot.com. The website is down, but thanks to the Internet Archive it will continue to be accessible. I’ll leave it to the reader to peruse the web site.

I saw a brief story on Mark Garcia and Patricia McQuarry in the Pioneer Press. It seems that they not only thought they married an idiot, they committed an idiotic form of tax fraud.

The couple, who are married and were the proprietors of the aforementioned web site, decided to claim to have received “…hundreds of thousands of dollars in 1099-OID income and that the entire amount had been withheld and paid over to the IRS on their behalf.” The couple even put down real bank tax identification numbers on their phony paperwork. Unfortunately, the IRS didn’t detect the fraud until after the fact. Yet it was certain that sooner or later the IRS would find the fraud given that the IRS document matching system wouldn’t match their phony paperwork to real 1099s.

One good fraud deserves another, so the couple then bought real estate and transferred it into a trust titled “POKE-A-BOTTOM.” (No, I didn’t make that up.) Then they were facing foreclosure, so they sent fake tax returns and frivolous documents to their bank. (In all seriousness, lying on a loan document can be a federal felony.) “The documents included fake tax forms and a “Bonded Promissory Note” for $10,000,000, along with instructions that the financial institution should use the document to pay off their $266,000 mortgage and keep the remaining funds.” Somehow the bank decided that wasn’t a good idea. I imagine that the RV and gold coins purchased by the couple with some of the proceeds will be used to pay back the United States Treasury.

The couple will have plenty of time to think of non-idiotic behaviors they can do in the future. There wasn’t anything idiotic about their sentencing for one count each of Conspiracy to Defraud the United States and two counts each of False Claims Against the United States: Mark Garcia received 30 months at ClubFed; his wife, Patricia McQuarry, received 40 months.

One Response to “Would the Proprietors of “I Married an Idiot” Commit Tax Fraud?”

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