This was one of my most significant and satisfying series of stories. The best part was that my long time span at the WSJ helped inform articles, all about the same Wall Street tax avoidance strategy pushed by Merrill Lynch, that ran during a span of seven years between August 1990 and March 1997. The first article revealed the scam in detail, and later stories chronicled the IRS crackdown. Far from the stories ending such tax schemes, they seem to have persisted. Nowadays many of the largest companies seem to run circles around the tax code.
