On January 16, 2026, Rodney Quinn Rupe — a 47-year-old IRS employee based in Syracuse, Utah — was sentenced to 12 months and one day in federal prison plus two years of supervised release after pleading guilty on June 11, 2025, to one count of wire fraud under 18 U.S.C. § 1343, following an investigation by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration and prosecution by Assistant U.S. Attorney Carl D. LeSueur for the District of Utah. Rupe had exploited his authenticated access to IRS internal taxpayer-account systems to execute three separate interstate wire transfers on April 15, 2022, diverting $2,021,986 in tax credits out of ExxonMobil's taxpayer account and into an account belonging to Ex XO Exteriors Ltd., a shell company he had created and controlled. On September 18, 2023, he posted the credits against his company's 2019 tax-year account to generate a U.S. Treasury refund check payable to Ex XO Exteriors Ltd. Rupe resigned from the IRS on October 31, 2023, then spent months in 2024 attempting to deposit the check at multiple banks. Prosecutors placed the total attempted theft at $2,100,377. The scheme collapsed not because the diversion was flagged internally, but because a multimillion-dollar Treasury check made out to an obscure shell company with no legitimate claim to ExxonMobil's credits proved impossible to cash — and every bank Rupe walked into brought investigators one step closer to the employee whose own access credentials had logged each transfer.