Celebrities Who Paid the Price for Not Paying Their Taxes

Have you ever heard the old saying that the only two things in life that are certain are death and taxes? Well, unfortunately, it turns out that many of your favorite celebrities may have gone further than you think in proving that such a claim is true. These celebrity tax dodgers ended up learning the hard way that in the eyes of the government, we're all too equal.

As it turns out, even celebrities who don’t pay taxes have to answer to the IRS, often for far more substantial charges than the rest of us, due to the fact that they’ve got a lot more money to be sneaky about. So rest assured that you’ve come to the right place if you’ve ever found yourself wondering, “Do famous people pay taxes?” As it turns out, even celebrity tax evaders have to pay up eventually.

From celebs who claim their sketchy business managers were to blame to a few who just straight-up owned their mistakes, this is a list of celebrities whose tax-paying escapades somehow went terribly wrong.

Famous Hollywood Madam Heidi Fleiss may have been able to fend off the feds for years when it came to her world famous prostitution ring, but the jig was up back in 1997 when they were able to serve her with charges of tax evasion. 

It was good news and bad news for rapper Ja Rule when he pled guilty to owing more than $1 million in back taxes and penalties due to a litany of tax problems from 2004 - 2008. Though he had to pay the money back and was sentenced to two years in prison, he was able to serve the federal sentence concurrently with another two-year sentence for criminal possession of a weapon in 2007.

Poor Lindsay's had her share of rough patches over the years, one of which wasn't helped by the fact that the IRS seized all of her bank accounts back in 2012. She owed them $233,904 in unpaid taxes, and that was after Charlie Sheen paid $100,000 of her debt for her. 

Marc Anthony has had multiple run-ins with the IRS over the years, starting with an incident back in 2007 where the IRS announced that he owed them $2.5 million in back taxes. The fun continued in 2010 when he received additional bills for over $3 million in unpaid taxes on his Long Island mansion.

For whatever reason, it seems Martha Stewart's criminal antics continually fail to amuse the government even as the rest of us have a good laugh at her expense. Before she did her famous stint in prison for insider trading, she was forced to pay $220,000 in back taxes and penalties to the State of New York in 2002 after she failed to pay taxes on her East Hampton mansion. Unfortunately for Martha, her excuse that she hardly spent any time actually residing in the mansion in question did nothing for her in the way of sympathy.

Martin Scorsese may know how to direct the hell out of a film, but it turns out that his skills when it comes to choosing an accountant haven't always been so great. His trouble with the IRS began in 2002, when he was hit with a variety of unpaid back taxes totaling over $2 million, which he wisely paid off quickly. However, he ended up in hot water with the IRS yet again in 2011 when he was hit with a $2.85 million tax lien.

Back in 2009, the IRS claimed that Nicolas Cage had been withholding a fortune even bigger than the one he found in National Treasure. As it turned out, he ended up owing the government over $6.2 million in federal income taxes.

Though he may have been the million-dollar winner of the first season of Survivor, Richard Hatch didn't appear to have many fans at the IRS back in 2006 when he was convicted of failing to list his winnings on his tax returns. He ended up being sentenced to jail and home confinement for over three years, but failed to learn his lesson as he was again busted in 2010 for not filing his taxes altogether.

Perhaps the most notorious celebrity tax evader  of them all, Wesley Snipes unsuccessfully attempted a variety of wily ways to avoid filing federal income tax returns between 1999 and 2001, a decision that would ultimately come back to haunt him in 2008. He was eventually sentenced to three years in prison after being found guilty of owing the federal government $7 million in back taxes plus penalties and interest.

In 1990, the IRS seized most of Willie Nelson's assets after he neglected to pay a $16 million tax bill they served him in 1984. In 1984, the IRS disallowed some exemptions Nelson had claimed on his tax returns, and Nelson blamed the mistake on his former accounting firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers. But he didn't have the money to pay the bill, so it languished for six years, accruing penalties and interest until it reached $32 million in 1990 and the IRS had enough. Through a combination of a telemarketing sales plan for a new album and a lawsuit against his former accountants, Nelson paid $15 million (the IRS cut the $32 million in half, and the sales of his assets totaled about $2 million) to settle his debt.