Date: June 10, 2025
Contact: [email protected]
Birmingham, AL – An Alabama chiropractor pleaded guilty yesterday to charges of tax evasion and interfering with the administration of the internal revenue laws. Gary Forrest Edwards, of Maylene, Alabama, pleaded guilty during his trial in Birmingham after the United States presented two witnesses and several exhibits.
According to court documents and evidence admitted during trial, from 2015 to 2023, Edwards attempted to evade payment of more than $2.5 million in income taxes and obstructed the IRS’s efforts to collect those taxes.
Edwards owned and operated the chiropractic practice Hoover Health & Wellness Center. In 2015, he agreed to and did file delinquent income tax returns with the IRS for tax years 2009 through 2013. He later filed an income tax return for 2017. Despite filing the returns and reporting millions of dollars in taxable income, Edwards never paid the more than $2.5 million in taxes he admitted he owed—or the near $1.9 million in penalties and interested assessed by the IRS.
Court documents also reflected Edwards’s admission to several of the ways by which he evaded payment of his taxes and obstructed collection of them: concealing financial accounts he owned from the IRS, transferring funds from accounts he owned to accounts in only his spouse’s name, filing false court documents to terminate federal tax liens against his property, lying to IRS criminal investigators, and more.
Edwards will be sentenced later this year. He faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison for the evasion charge and three years in prison on the obstruction charge. He also faces a period of supervised release, restitution, and monetary penalties. U.S. District Judge Anna Manasco will determine any sentence after considering the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors.
Acting Deputy Assistant Attorney General Karen E. Kelly of the Justice Department’s Tax Division and United States Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama Prim F. Escalona made the announcement.
IRS Criminal Investigation is investigating the case. Tax Division Trial Attorney Isaiah Boyd and Assistant United States Attorney Allison Garnett are prosecuting the case.
IRS Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) is the law enforcement arm of the IRS, responsible for conducting financial crime investigations, including tax fraud, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, public corruption, healthcare fraud, identity theft and more. IRS-CI special agents are the only federal law enforcement agents with investigative jurisdiction over violations of the Internal Revenue Code, obtaining a 90% federal conviction rate. The agency has 19 field offices located across the U.S. and 14 attaché posts abroad.