(HorizonPost.com) – A former Internal Revenue Service employee from the Utah service center was indicted last week for allegedly attempting to steal $2.1 million in Exxon Mobil’s tax credits by diverting the money to a phony company using a taxpayer database.
According to a June 5 press release from the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Utah, 46-year-old Rodney Quinn Rupe of Syracuse, Utah received a check from the US Treasury for $2,100,377 in January 2024 after he diverted the tax credits to an entity he created. Over the next two months, Rupe then attempted to deposit the check at multiple credit union locations.
The indictment, filed in US District Court in Salt Lake City, charges Rupe with multiple counts, including theft of government property, bank fraud, wire fraud, and mail fraud.
Rupe was employed at the IRS service center located in Ogden, Utah when in 2021, he began his scheme to divert the funds by using his access to an IRS computer database “to adjust tax, credits, penalties, and interest to certain taxpayer accounts,” according to the indictment.
Using the IRS database, Rupe accessed the taxpayer account for Exxon Mobil starting in April 2021. For the next three months, he used the database to create an entity he controlled by assigning an Employer Identification Number (EIN) to a fraudulent business called Ex Xo Exteriors Ltd.
The following April, Rupe accessed the database and transferred $2.02 million in tax credits from the taxpayer account of Exxon Mobil to the account of his phony business Ex Xo Exteriors Ltd., according to the indictment.
Then in August 2023, Rupe again accessed the IRS database to “transfer the diverted tax credit funds from one tax year to another.”
In September 2023, Rupe allegedly applied the total tax credits to Ex Xo Exteriors’s tax account for 2019. This resulted in the IRS generating a refund to the phony company of $2.1 million which was then mailed in the form of a check from the Treasury Department.
After receiving the check in January 2024, Rupe then attempted to deposit it at multiple locations of America First Credit Union.
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