Indictments

Four defendants in the Southern District of West Virginia have been charged in separate cases with various bankruptcy crimes in a small fraud sweep that U.S. Attorney Charles T. Miller hopes will "serve as a warning to those who would abuse the [bankruptcy] system."

Now that debtors must produce copies of their tax returns in bankruptcy cases as part of the bankruptcy laws' already numerous disclosure requirements it was only a matter of time before we began to see some criminal cases built on debtors' making or using false writings (or documents containing false statements) within an executive branch matter in violation of 18 U.S.C. 1001.