Tax troubles.(Whispers)(Brief article)

A former law partner of convicted felons Keith Moser and Barry Jewell is back in the news.

A medical group in California has sued Scott Fletcher and the Fletcher Law Firm of Little Rock for allegedly botching the creation of a retirement plan that cost the group more than $200,000 after an IRS audit.

Pacific Heart & Vascular Medical Group said in the lawsuit that Fletcher established a retirement plan for the company in 2002.

In 2007, though, the IRS audited the plan and found "the actuarial assumptions were applied incorrectly" for the years between 2002 and 2006, the lawsuit said. "The plan had been either under funded or over funded for those years."

As a result, the medical group had to pay $94,344 in penalties, interest of nearly $21,000 and cough up $107,000 to attorneys to defend itself in the audit.

The medical group is seeking an unspecified amount of damages from Fletcher.

Fletcher and his attorney, Edwin Lowther of Little Rock, didn't return calls for comment. But Fletcher denied the allegations in his court filings and asked that the case be dismissed.

Fletcher was once part of the firm Jewell Moser Fletcher & Holleman, which operated between September 1996 and August 2002.

While Fletcher was never implicated, two of his partners were. Moser is serving a more than 15-year federal prison sentence for stealing nearly $2 million of his clients' money.

Jewell was convicted by a federal jury in September on charges of tax evasion. He has been sentenced to 30 months in prison.

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