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"Dance Moms" star Abby Lee Miller pleaded guilty Monday to bankruptcy fraud and failing to report thousands of dollars in Australian currency she brought into the country, the Associated Press reported yesterday. Miller pleaded guilty to one count of concealing bankruptcy assets and one count of structuring international monetary transactions. She was charged last fall with illegally trying to hide $775,000 worth of income from the Lifetime network reality show and spinoff projects during her Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Authorities later accused her of dividing more than $120,000 into plastic bags and having others in her group put the bags in their luggage in August 2014, violating a law requiring people to report bringing more than $10,000 worth of foreign currency into the country. Read more. 

Don’t miss the “Practicing in the Limelight: The Challenges Faced in Cases Involving High-Profile Debtors” session at ABI’s 11th Annual Northeast Consumer Forum on July 14-16! 

F. Lee Bailey, the superstar lawyer who was part of O.J. Simpson’s defense team, has filed for bankruptcy in federal court in Maine in an attempt to discharge a federal tax debt of nearly $5.2 million, the Portland (Maine) Press Herald reported today. Debts to the Internal Revenue Service are not normally discharged in bankruptcy proceedings, but Bailey said on Friday that they can be after a period of time and as long as he has complied with certain conditions, such as filing and paying his taxes on time since the original taxes and penalties were assessed. He owes the money from a dispute over his reportable income from 1993 to 2001. Bailey was disbarred in Florida in 2001 over his handling of shares of stock owned by a client who pleaded guilty to drug smuggling and money laundering. That stock also led to the dispute with the IRS, which said Bailey owed $1.9 million because of his failure to report some of the stock proceeds as income. With interest and penalties, the IRS filed liens against Bailey totaling $4.5 million, which has since grown to nearly $5.2 million.