The federal government is trying to bar a financial attorney from offering alleged fraudulent tax saving schemes that help wealthy clients, many of them in the St. Louis area, according to a suit filed Monday in U.S. District Court here.

In the suit, the Internal Revenue Service asks the court to forbid St. Louis attorney Philip A. Kaiser and others affiliated with him from promoting fraudulent tax schemes. The suit says those schemes include:

- sham transactions claiming "massive" charitable deductions, with little or no money going to legitimate charities;

- evasion of federal income tax on gains from stock sales by disguising the sales as loans;

- illegal circumvention of contribution limits for Roth IRAs;

- and evasion of income tax on business earnings by using transactions with sham corporations.