Bucks lawyer indicted on tax, ID theft charges
A Bucks County lawyer was indicted for allegedly defrauding a client’s estate of more than $1.7 million, federal prosecutors in Philadelphia said Thursday.
Randolph Scott, 70, of Doylestown, Pa., who maintained his own law firm in Warrington, was charged with one count of mail fraud, two counts of aggravated identity theft, one count of tax evasion, one count of attempting to interfere with administration of internal revenue laws and three counts of failure to file income tax returns.
According to the indictment, between December 2005 and October 2011, while representing the estate of John C. Bready, Scott diverted approximately $1.76 million of estate funds to his law office accounts. Because the estate was valued at more than $6 million at the time of Bready’s death in 2005, federal law required that a federal estate tax return be filed which would have resulted in approximately $520,351 being paid to the Internal Revenue Service. The indictment alleges that Scott purposefully failed to file the required form in order to keep enough money in the estate to pay its beneficiaries and to avoid detection of the theft.
Prosecutors also said after the estate’s executor died in 2009, Scott failed to disclose the death so that the investment account manager would continue to send the executor’s checks to Scott’s law firm. Scott then allegedly forged the executor’s signature and deposited the checks into his law firm’s account. Prosecutors said Scott also had the successor executor sign a document renouncing the position of successor executor so that Scott could continue to forge the signature of the deceased executor and divert money belonging to the estate.
In addition to the charges, the indictment contains a notice of forfeiture seeking $1.76 million.
Nino Tinari, Scott’s lawyer, said his client denies the charges as presented in the indictment. Scott is set to be arraigned Friday.
Banking, Insurance, Law
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