Kansas City ‘sovereign citizen’ made false tax claims for millions, prosecutors say

A Kansas City woman who federal prosecutors say claimed to be a “sovereign citizen” and attempted to fraudulently claim millions of dollars in refunds from the Internal Revenue Service has been charged with four felonies.

Prosecutors said at one point, the IRS erroneously sent the woman a check for more than $2 million and that suspicious employees at a credit union halted the payment after she endorsed the check and attempted to cash it.

A grand jury indicted Alice-Marie Riding, 56, on one count of making a false claim against the United States and three counts of mail fraud in U.S. District Court in Kansas City on May 5. The charges were unsealed Thursday after Riding was arrested in Arizona, according to court records.

In 2023, Riding filed a form for the 2020 tax year falsely claiming a credit of around $2.1 million, and the IRS sent her a refund check for about $2 million after applying a portion of her claim to her outstanding tax debt of about $88,000, according to court documents. When she attempted to cash the check at a credit union, employees became suspicious and reported the check to the IRS, which confirmed it was issued erroneously, prosecutors said.

Riding then went on to make false claims for around $1.8 million for 2021 and for about $700,000 for 2024, prosecutors said. The IRS didn’t issue refunds for those claims, according to court documents.

Riding subscribed to the concept of “sovereign citizenship” — a broad anti-government movement — prosecutors said.

“Those who subscribe to the theory of sovereign citizenship assert that after the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution, the United States government used individuals’ birth certificates and Social Security documents to trick them into becoming United States citizens instead of citizens of their respective states,” prosecutors wrote in court documents.

“These individuals also assert the government uses these documents as security for the national debt by creating individual trust fund accounts that contain each person’s lifetime profits. They assert they can access these trust fund accounts using, among other things, the IRS code and fraudulent financial documents.”

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