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While This Accountant Was Still Working In Our Offices Every Day, He Secretly Had His Well-Connected Co-Conspirators

The September 1, 1994 IRS raid came about as the result of a plot hatched by a former chief in-house accountant while he was working for us and supposedly overseeing our accounting and the preparation of our tax returns. About two years before the raid, he began stealing information from our files and enlisting a group of well-connected former IRS, Justice Department and Treasury Department officials to help him. In March of 1993, they approached the highest level of the IRS, the acting IRS chief counsel, the number one lawyer at the IRS, with a plan. While this accountant was still working in our offices every day, he secretly had his well-connected co-conspirators travel here to Washington to meet the acting chief counsel at the IRS national office. They used their connections to entice the IRS to throw its full terrifying weight against us in exchange for money, and lots of it. In June of 1993, I fired the accountant for incompetence, giving him a generous severance and an automobile. I never guessed that his scheme to ruin me and make himself rich at my expense was already well underway. On November 9th, 1993, the IRS district director in Dallas signed an agreement to pay our former in-house accountant as much as a $25 million bounty, his share of the money he told the IRS to expect to take from us. Our former accountant in turn signed a contract with the former Justice Department, IRS and Treasury lawyers who had helped him, promising to pay each of them a share of this huge IRS reward.

At the same time, these conspirators took the stolen information to prospective plaintiffs and their lawyers and used it to generate spurious private but ultimately futile lawsuits seeking outrageous damages from us. Anyone could have seen that these people had a financial stake in destroying me. But the IRS accepted them and their story without bothering to investigate their motives or honesty. All too happy to accept this information, the IRS never bothered to inquire how its informer got it or whether it was true before launching its massive raid. It could have checked our former accountant's claims by employing the usual but far less intimidating or intrusive practice of sending an agent over to our office to audit our financial records. I still do not know why it chose not to issue us a summons or a subpoena. Had it done either, we would never have had to endure this nightmare. There was one enormous problem with all of this. We had committed no crime.

Not long after the raid, the Justice Department began to realize that our former accountant lacked credibility and that his motives and conduct were highly suspect. However, the IRS would not quit. Spurred on by conspirators chasing a $25 million reward, IRS agents terrorized our employees, knocking on their doors after work and scaring most of them to death. The pressure on our loyal, hard-working employees was intense. Many of them were working well into the night and on weekends trying to help our lawyers and accountants figure out what the IRS was told we had done wrong, while simultaneously trying to keep up with our regular business. That was the toughest part. There was no new business. An independent oil company's most precious asset is its reputation. Ours was shot to heck. The damage to our family business and reputation was enormous. The emotional damage was even greater.

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