According to media reports, an accountant from
Hoover, Alabama, has been acquitted of nine counts of tax evasion
and filing fraudulent personal and business state income tax
returns after a jury accepted his story of computer virus
attack.
Prosecutors at Montgomery County Circuit Court had accused
Eugene Pitts, a 44-year-old auditor, of under-reporting income
between 1997 and 1999. His accounting firm, Pitts, Daniels &
Co., grossed more than $1 million during those years, but the
numbers on Pitts' tax returns for the period did not reflect
this.
Pitts accepted that there were errors in the figures on his tax
returns, but blamed an unnamed computer virus for the inaccuracies.
State prosecutors noted that the alleged virus apparently did not
affect the tax returns of clients prepared on the same computer.
The jury took three hours to find Mr Pitts innocent on all
charges.
Had he been found guilty, Pitts could have faced a maximum
sentence of 33 years in prison and up to $900,000 in fines.
"Without knowing the name of the virus which infected Mr Pitts'
computer, it is difficult to describe how it might have affected
his tax returns and not those of his clients. It is certainly
curious that only his records were targeted by the virus," said
Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos Anti-Virus.
"However, there is one thing he is clearly guilty of - not keeping
his computer protected with the latest anti-virus software, and
failing to follow safe computing guidelines. There can be no excuse
for any professional not to defend his customers' and his own data
against this kind of virus damage."
Sophos recently reported how a British
man was acquitted of child pornography charges after successfully
arguing the material may have been placed on his computer by a
Trojan horse.
More than 100 million users in 150 countries rely on Sophos as the best protection against complex threats and data loss. Sophos is committed to providing security and data protection solutions that are simple to manage, deploy and use and that deliver the industry's lowest total cost of ownership. Sophos offers award-winning encryption, endpoint security, web, email, and network access control solutions backed by SophosLabs - a global network of threat intelligence centers. With more than two decades of experience, Sophos is regarded as a leader in security and data protection by top analyst firms and has received many industry awards.
Sophos is headquartered in Boston, US and Oxford, UK. More information is available at www.sophos.com.