WHAT A HEEL: Federal prosecutors charged economist David Gilmartin with tax evasion, obstruction of the IRS, failure to file a tax return, and failure to pay taxes, Accounting Today reports:

The 68-year-old holds a Ph.D. in economics. He provided various economics-related consulting services to employers and clients between 1989 and 2010, including analyzing and reconstructing clinical databases for pharmaceutical companies; performing profitability analyses for credit card companies; conducting statistical analyses for a large pharmaceutical company in connection with a new drug application; and analyzing and preparing testimony for companies involved in patent and antitrust litigation. …

He used a variety of imaginative strategies to avoid paying taxes. Gilmartin allegedly submitted IRS forms to certain employers in which he falsely and fraudulently claimed to be exempt from taxes, in order to cause the employers not to withhold taxes. He also has been accused of providing someone else’s Social Security number to an employer and represented that it was his.

Prosecutors claim he refused to provide one employer with his Social Security number, citing a purported “religious objection,” in an attempt to prevent the employer from withholding taxes. Gilmartin also allegedly caused checks paid to him as compensation to be made payable to a finance company, in order to pay down a personal line of credit and to prevent the IRS from seizing, pursuant to bank levies, the funds paid to him as compensation.

Gilmartin, who used to live in NYC until 2006 but now lives in CA, allegedly owes the IRS more than $500,000. He faces up to five years in prison on the tax evasion charge, up to three years on the obstruction charge and as much as one year in prison on each of the failure-to-file and failure-to-pay taxes charges.