Nurses need a valid license from their state nursing board to practice nursing in the state. Nurses can face a wide range of issues giving rise to disciplinary charges. Common disciplinary issues include incompetence, malpractice, patient abuse or neglect, and professional misconduct like impaired or intoxicated nursing practice. Perhaps surprisingly, though, tax fraud or evasion can be another serious disciplinary issue. Retain the Lento Law Firm's premier Professional License Defense Team now if you face or expect to face nursing board disciplinary charges related to your tax fraud or evasion issues. Call 888.535.3686 or complete this contact form now. Let us help you preserve and protect your nursing license, practice, employment, and career.
The Nature of Tax Fraud or Evasion
Tax fraud or invasion typically involves a taxpayer's willful, deliberate, or reckless disregard of current or past obligations to account for earnings, passive income, or taxable inheritances, gifts, and property, and to pay the related federal, state, and local tax obligations. As well-compensated professionals, nurses can owe considerable income tax obligations. Nurses can also own assets, like stocks, bonds, or real estate, producing considerable taxable passive income. Nurses can also receive inheritances and gifts, and own personal or real property, incurring considerable tax obligations. You need not be in business or an employer to owe federal, state, and local tax obligations. Deliberately avoiding or failing or refusing to address those obligations responsibly can constitute tax fraud or evasion.
The Elements of Tax Fraud or Evasion
Federal tax fraud or evasion under 26 U.S. Code § 7201, which bears the title “Attempt to evade or defeat tax,” has the following definition:
“Any person who willfully attempts in any manner to evade or defeat any tax imposed by this title or the payment thereof shall, in addition to other penalties provided by law, be guilty of a felony and, upon conviction thereof, shall be fined not more than $100,000... or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both, together with the costs of prosecution.”
The elements of federal tax fraud or evasion thus include (1) that an unpaid tax liability exists, (2) you engaged in some affirmative act to evade or attempt to evade that tax liability, and (3) you had the specific intent to evade the tax. Specific intent means that you know you had a legal duty to pay the obligation and purposefully took action to avoid doing so. To convict a taxpayer of tax fraud or evasion, the prosecution must prove each of these elements beyond a reasonable doubt.
Penalties for Tax Fraud or Evasion
As the above federal statute shows, tax fraud or evasion can result in both a considerable fine, with related forfeitures and executions on income and assets, and a considerable term of imprisonment on felony conviction. You should have the representation of a skilled and experienced tax attorney to contest your tax obligation and the representation of a skilled and experienced criminal defense attorney to defend your criminal charge. But you can also face state nursing board disciplinary charges relating to tax fraud or evasion. And your loss of your nursing license, employment, practice, and career can be more burdensome, significant, and even ruinous than your civil liability or criminal exposure. Get our skilled and experienced representation for your nursing license defense. Do not rely on unqualified criminal defense or tax attorney representation.
The Nature of Tax Fraud or Evasion Proceedings
As just indicated, a tax fraud or evasion proceeding can be a federal criminal court prosecution. But a tax fraud or evasion proceeding can also involve a state criminal court prosecution if the obligation includes state, in addition to federal, taxes. Yet a tax fraud or evasion proceeding can also involve a federal administrative action of the IRS under 26 CFR § 301.7430-3, or an equivalent state administrative proceeding of your state tax authority, to determine the existence and extent of your tax liability. You don't have to face criminal court charges and suffer criminal conviction to owe a substantial tax obligation under a formal administrative proceeding. Your state nursing board may use either a criminal court conviction or an administrative determination of your tax obligation to pursue disciplinary charges relating to tax fraud or evasion. In either instance, we can help you raise your available defenses for your best disciplinary outcome.
The Difference Between Criminal and Administrative Responsibility
Your state nursing board officials may regard your criminal conviction as the more serious disciplinary matter over your administrative determination, because of the specific intent element of the crime. That specific intent element implies your bad intentions, corrupt character, and evasive or concealing actions, whereas your administrative determination may rely solely on your owing the obligation, without corrupt intent to avoid paying it. Corrupt character and bad intent may raise significantly greater concern on the part of your state nursing board disciplinary officials than your simple failure to pay a substantial tax liability. You might, for instance, have had good reason to pay other obligations, like medical care or dependent care expenses, than tax liabilities. If you avoid criminal conviction but incur an administrative determination, we can help you make a case before the state nursing board as to the significance of that difference.
IRS Discovery of Tax Fraud or Evasion Issues
You may wonder how the IRS may discover or has discovered your unpaid tax liability and any alleged effort to evade it. Anyone may complain to the IRS regarding a taxpayer's suspected fraud or evasion. Indeed, the IRS rewards such whistleblowers. Internal Revenue Code Section 7623 provides for a 15 percent to 30 percent award to whistleblowers of the unreported and unpaid tax liability. An acquaintance of yours, no longer a friend, could make substantial money by turning you into the IRS. However, the IRS may already be well aware of your unpaid tax liability from employer records, contractor 1099 forms, tax audits, and other ordinary means by which the IRS monitors payment of taxes. It doesn't necessarily take a motivated whistleblower to fall onto bad terms with the IRS.
Nursing Board Discovery of Tax Fraud Issues
Likewise, you may wonder how your state nursing license board may discover or has discovered your alleged tax fraud or evasion. Anyone may complain to a state nursing board regarding a nurse's character, fitness, or conduct, including tax fraud or evasion. But other healthcare professionals, like the doctors and nurses with whom you work, may have obligations to report your suspected substantial unfitness for nursing, the failure in which can lead to their own disciplinary charges. In other words, they may have to turn you in if they learn about your alleged tax fraud or evasion. The same may be true for your hospital, nursing home, or medical clinic employer. Thus, beware of sharing your tax issues with professional colleagues and contacts. Word gets around. Someone may turn you in.
State nursing board officials have other ways, though, to discover your tax fraud or evasion issues. The IRS or other tax authority may notify your state nursing board. The IRS or other tax authority may alternatively publish your tax liability in a public database that your state nursing board regularly searches. You may even have your own obligation to share your tax fraud or evasion conviction or determination with your state nursing board, if your state has a self-reporting requirement or if your state nursing board's renewal form requires that disclosure. Concealing your tax fraud or evasion issues when you have a duty to disclose them to your state nursing board may lead to credential fraud disciplinary charges. Your cover up may be worse than your alleged crime. Let us help you determine your reporting duties. Let us also help you respond to state nursing board inquiries.
Reasons for Tax Evasion
The reasons, justifications, and excuses taxpayers have or raise for not paying their taxes and for tax fraud or evasion can matter as to how a state nursing board treats tax fraud or evasion findings and allegations. One could perhaps say that one never has a good reason to evade taxes, given the formidable powers of the IRS and criminal courts related to tax enforcement. However, individuals can have other pressing obligations beyond paying taxes. And those obligations can certainly seem a more immediate and higher priority. We've already given the example above of needing to devote income to acquire and pay for critical medical care, either for yourself or a close family member. Excuses of this kind are generally not legal defenses to a formal criminal tax fraud or evasion charge, nor to an IRS administrative proceeding. If you owe the taxes, you pay the taxes. But compelling and humane reasons to devote finances to higher priority obligations may constitute mitigating circumstances before your state nursing board in disciplinary proceedings. Let us help you make your best case in the mitigation of licensing sanctions.
Board Authority to Discipline Nursing Licenses
State nursing boards not only have the obligation and authority to license nurses. They also have the obligation and authority to discipline nursing licenses. Florida's nursing laws, Section 464.018, provide a good example, authorizing nursing license discipline on a wide range of grounds. State nursing boards also regularly exercise that disciplinary authority. The New York State Education Department, Office of the Professions, for instance, publishes nursing license discipline on its website in searchable form for public scrutiny. Don't doubt your state nursing board's authority and willingness to pursue disciplinary charges against you related to tax fraud or evasion allegations, findings, or conviction. Instead, let us help you answer and successfully defend the charges.
Nursing Board Disciplinary Sanctions
You may face severe disciplinary sanctions if your state nursing license board finds that you committed tax fraud or evasion and that your misconduct violated the board's nursing standards and rules. For example, Section 32-1663 of Arizona's Nurse Practice Act authorizes the Arizona State Board of Nursing to suspend, revoke, limit, or condition the license of a nurse violating the Board's nursing standards. License suspension, requiring you to give up your nursing practice and employment, is a common sanction for a serious wrong. Your state nursing board, though, likely has broad discretion to impose lesser penalties or even to limit its response to remedial measures like training, monitoring, supervision, or probation. Our goal in your nursing license defense would be to avoid sanctions entirely or to minimize them in a way that enables you to retain your employment, patient relationships, and reputation.
Provisions Authorizing Discipline for Tax Fraud
State nursing practice acts typically articulate the grounds on which the state nursing board may discipline its licensed nurses. Section 464.018 of Florida's Nursing Practice Act is a good example, stating twenty or more independent grounds on which to bring disciplinary charges and impose sanctions up to license suspension or revocation. Some of those common grounds, included in the Florida Nursing Practice Act and other similar state acts, arguably reach tax fraud or evasion. Examples include (1) being convicted of a felony crime, (2) being convicted of a crime relating to fraudulent practices, and (3) unprofessional conduct as the nursing board determines.
Tax fraud or evasion can constitute a federal felony crime. Felony conviction suggests poor character for law compliance. Your felony conviction for tax fraud may well fall within the grounds for discipline before your state nursing board. Tax fraud or evasion can also constitute a crime relating to fraudulent practices. State nursing boards have good reason to be wary of the fitness of a nurse who defrauds others. Such a nurse might lie, cheat, make false record entries, or steal from a patient in the course of nursing practice. Whether tax fraud or evasion also constitutes unprofessional conduct may be an open question. Any crime serious enough to cast the nursing profession in a bad light may qualify as unprofessional conduct. Let us make appropriate arguments that your tax fraud or evasion issues do not qualify as grounds for discipline. The success of our argument may depend on your state nursing practice act's specific grounds for discipline and your specific circumstances.
Defenses to Discipline for Tax Fraud or Evasion
Taxpayers accused of tax fraud or evasion may have valid defenses to the criminal charges. Your criminal defense attorney can help you defend the criminal charge, raising those defenses. Those defenses may include that you did not owe the alleged tax liability. That liability may have been an obligation of your spouse or employer, may not have existed at all, or may have been eliminated or excused by other tax code provisions. Your defenses may also include that you did not have the specific intent to avoid or defeat taxes. You may have been unaware of the alleged obligation, even if it actually existed. Or you may have earnestly tried to pay and been willing to pay but have been frankly unable. You may have had extenuating circumstances like identity theft loss, burglary or robbery loss, or fire loss, among other financial reversals beyond your control.
Whatever your defenses to the tax fraud or evasion crime may be, we can also raise as defenses in your state nursing board disciplinary proceeding. Do not rely on unqualified criminal defense counsel to represent you in your state nursing board licensing proceeding. Licensing proceedings are administrative in nature, not court proceedings, and not criminal proceedings. The rules, customs, law, and procedures are all different for your administrative licensing proceeding. Our attorneys have the substantial administrative skill and experience to raise a sensitive, strategic, and effective license disciplinary defense. Let us do so. Your nursing license, employment, and career are worth it.
The Impact of Tax Fraud on Nursing Licenses
The above discussion brings us to the potential impact of tax fraud or evasion on your nursing license. While state nursing board officials may regard any conduct that could constitute a felony crime as sufficiently serious for license suspension or revocation, we would likely have good grounds to argue that tax fraud or evasion is a crime completely unrelated to nursing practice. Tax fraud or evasion involves finances and financial reporting, not health, healthcare, and healthcare recordkeeping. The two subjects seem far enough apart to make a credible and potentially convincing argument for no discipline and no sanction. State nursing board officials may maintain that tax dishonesty implicates nursing dishonesty. That argument presents some risk of discipline. Yet our credible response may be that alleged dishonesty as to tax obligations, where no patient mental or physical health or safety is involved, is so different from any alleged carelessness or dishonesty about patient health or safety as to be insufficient grounds for discipline. Let us help you evaluate and minimize your disciplinary risk.
Protective Procedures Against Discipline
Keep in mind when considering the potential impact of your tax fraud or evasion issues on your nursing license that disciplinary charges are not the same as a finding of misconduct or the necessary imposition of a sanction. If you face disciplinary charges, the state nursing board officials issuing those charges may hope and expect that you will come forward with exonerating and mitigating evidence and explanations. We can help you do so by invoking your state nursing board's protective procedures. Section 32-1664 of Arizona's Nursing Practice Act is an example, offering an administrative hearing before an administrative law judge or panel of Arizona State Nursing Board members for contested cases of discipline. We can gather and present your exonerating and mitigating evidence at that hearing while cross-examining adverse witnesses and challenging incriminating evidence. If you have already lost your state nursing board hearing, we can take available appeals to your full state nursing board or to a civil court of your state, as your state nursing practice act and administrative procedure act provide.
The Defense Attorney's Role In Discipline Cases
Do not underestimate our role in your defense of state nursing board administrative license proceedings. Our first action when you retain us will be to gather, analyze, and organize all your information and documentation to present to state nursing board officials. We will promptly appear on your behalf before the board to ensure that they are aware of our representation and that they direct communications to us. We may be able to arrange a prompt conciliation conference at which to advocate and negotiate for early voluntary dismissal of your disciplinary charge. We know the remedial measures that state nursing board officials are most likely to accept in lieu of punitive sanctions. We also know how to remind state nursing board officials of the state's need for your skilled nursing services, your commitment to the safe and competent exercise of those skills, and that your tax fraud or evasion issues present no risk to patients or the public. We have many other services that we provide, including communicating with your employer if necessary during the pending disciplinary proceeding to ensure that your employer appreciates your diligence in defending the charges and our likelihood of success on your behalf.
Your States in the License Disciplinary Proceeding
You should also keep in mind your very high stakes in your state nursing board licensing proceeding. Your license, job, career, reputation, and relationships are on the line. So, too, may be your finances and all that those finances afford in housing, transportation, healthcare or insurance, food, and other essentials, on which you and your family may well depend. Don't underestimate your stakes and thus fail to devote due attention to your defense of state nursing board charges. Instead, retain the Lento Law Firm's premier Professional License Defense Team now by calling 888.535.3686 or completing this contact form. We have helped hundreds of professionals nationwide successfully defend and defeat all kinds of disciplinary charges including charges relating to tax fraud or evasion issues.
