IRS Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) Presents: Tax Case of the Month

Useful Links

About CI

What do we investigate?

How investigations are initiated

J5 international partnership

IRS.gov/CI

Tax Schemes and Fraud

Tax Fraud Alerts

Report Suspected Tax Fraud

Voluntary Disclosure

CI Newsroom

CI News Releases

CI Resources

CI Annual Reports

February Tax Case of the Month

Celebrity tax advisor sentenced for concealing over $70M in income

Frank Butselaar, an international tax advisor from the Netherlands, was sentenced to 30 months in U.S. federal prison after pleading guilty to tax fraud.

Butselaar advised the creation of offshore structures for multiple ultra-high-net-worth individuals who earned money all over the world and did so while a shareholder in the Amsterdam office of a major U.S.-based international law firm. Those clients included world-famous DJs, including Tijs Verwest, also known as, “DJ Tiesto,” and Nick van de Wall, also known as, “DJ Afrojack,” and fashion models Patricia van der Vliet and Daria Strokous.

After the clients became U.S. taxpayers, Butselaar and his co-conspirators concealed the clients’ offshore income using nominee owners of their offshore structures. As part of the scheme, these nominees were installed to make it appear as though the clients’ earnings now belonged to someone else, generally a family member who lived outside the U.S.

Despite these paper changes in ownership, Butselaar never told the clients anything of substance had changed, therefore, the clients continued to operate their offshore entities as their own and believed they had access to and could direct the money they were accumulating offshore.

Butselaar worked with his partners to conceal otherwise reportable income from U.S. authorities. Over the course of five years, Butselaar and co-conspirators omitted substantial income earned by clients and held offshore. The amount of unreported income exceeded $70 million.

IRS-CI has been a member of The Joint Chiefs of Global Tax Enforcement (J5) since 2018, and we worked with our J5 partners in this case. Restitution amounts are still pending.

Each month, IRS-CI leadership selects one criminal case adjudicated during the previous month to serve as the Tax Case of the Month. This month’s case was investigated by IRS-CI’s New York Field Office.

Back to top

IRS-CI is the criminal investigative arm of the IRS, responsible for conducting financial crime investigations, including tax fraud, narcotics trafficking, money-laundering, public corruption, healthcare fraud, identity theft and more. IRS-CI special agents are the only federal law enforcement agents with investigative jurisdiction over violations of the Internal Revenue Code, obtaining a more than a 90 percent federal conviction rate. The agency has 20 field offices located across the U.S. and 12 attaché posts abroad.