July 28 (UPI) — A Florida woman is headed to prison after helping her family hide nearly $100 million from the federal government.
The U.S. Department of Justice announced Monday that Gilda Rosenberg of Golden Beach in Miami-Dade County has been sentenced to 30 months in prison for conspiring to defraud the United States by stashing tens of millions of dollars in undeclared foreign financial accounts, for filing false tax returns and evading taxes, among other offenses.
According to court documents, Rosenberg, who is a dual U.S. and Colombian citizen, worked in conjunction with two other members of her family in a plan to hide more than $90 million in income and assets by keeping the money in undeclared bank accounts in Andorra, Israel, Panama and Switzerland.
Rosenberg’s family had been keeping offshore accounts since the 1970s, and by the 1990s she had become an owner and authorized signer on some of those accounts. She also knew that neither she or her relatives had disclosed these accounts to the United States nor had paid any taxes on income earned from the accounts.
By the 2000s, the family had shifted their assets to various foreign banks in order to continue hiding it all from the IRS, and Rosenberg was documented as the as the beneficial owner of accounts at banks in Switzerland and Andorra. She also signed false account opening documents that claimed she was only a Colombian citizen and not American.
Rosenberg and her involved relatives also didn’t disclose their foreign financial accounts as legally required, while also omitting their offshore assets on their U.S. tax returns.
By 2017, all those involved schemed to continue evading paying the IRS by dividing their assets and signing documents that made it appear Rosenberg and a relative gifted their assets to another relative who had renounced his American citizenship.
The group then attempted to secretly transfer assets to Rosenberg in the United States and to conceal their continued tax evasion by, among other methods, creating fake loans and investment documents to make it appear that transfers to and from Rosenberg were loans and business investments.
It has since been determined that Rosenberg and two of her co-conspirators caused a tax loss to the United States of more than $1.9 million between 2009 and 2017, which she has since agreed to pay in restitution, not including interest. Additionally, as per her plea agreement, she was required to pay a penalty of over $5.8 million to the IRS to resolve a civil liability related to failing to disclose her foreign financial accounts.