A Georgia attorney has been sentenced to 16 months in prison for obstructing the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) through his involvement in promoting abusive syndicated conservation easement tax shelters. According to court documents and statements, Vi Bui, an attorney and partner at Sinnott & Co., was part of a scheme that defrauded the IRS by organizing illegal tax shelters from at least 2012 until May 2020.
The operation involved creating partnerships that acquired land or land-owning companies and then donated conservation easements over this land. Fraudulent appraisals were used to inflate the value of these easements, allowing partnerships to claim charitable contribution tax deductions based on these inflated values. This resulted in fraudulent tax deductions for wealthy clients who bought units in the partnership. Many clients joined after the donation of interest in land and after the relevant tax year had ended. Bui was aware that co-conspirators Jack Fisher, James Sinnott, and others backdated documents to make it appear as if participants had purchased their units on time.
To evade detection by the IRS, Bui and others made efforts to present the partnerships as legitimate real estate development companies. They created false paperwork such as appraisals and subscription agreements, conducted sham votes on what to do with the land, and prepared lengthy documents disguising the true nature of transactions.
In one instance during an undercover operation in 2018, Bui prepared false documents related to a 2014 tax shelter, intending to mislead investigators into believing they were executed before the purported donation of the conservation easement.
Bui earned significant income from his role in this illegal scheme and used these shelters to evade his own taxes by filing false personal returns from 2013 through 2018.
U.S. District Court Chief Judge Timothy C. Batten Sr. also ordered Bui to serve one year of supervised release and pay $8,250,244 in restitution to the IRS.
The announcement was made by Acting Deputy Assistant Attorney General Karen E. Kelly of the Justice Department’s Tax Division and U.S. Attorney Theodore S. Hertzberg for the Northern District of Georgia. The investigation received assistance from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of North Carolina.
The case was investigated by IRS Criminal Investigation and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. It was prosecuted by Senior Litigation Counsel Richard M. Rolwing and Trial Attorneys Parker Tobin, Jessica Kraft, Nicholas Schilling from the Tax Division with support from Assistant U.S. Attorney Samir Kaushal for the Northern District of Georgia.