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Among the Glock-related material the IRS allegedly is examining: boxes of invoices and memos provided by the company’s former senior executive in the U.S., Paul F. Jannuzzo. Once one of the most prominent gun industry executives in America, Jannuzzo said in a federal complaint he filed last year that Gaston Glock used his companies’ complicated structure to conceal profits from American tax authorities. “[Glock] has organized an elaborate scheme to both skim money from gross sales and to launder those funds through various foreign entities,” Jannuzzo alleged in the sealed May 12, 2008, IRS filing, which BusinessWeek has reviewed. “The skim is approximately $20.00 per firearm sold,” according to the complaint. Glock’s U.S. unit, which generates the bulk of the company’s sales, has sold about 5 million pistols since the late 1980s, Jannuzzo estimates in an interview.

A burly man with a staccato delivery, Jannuzzo has several potential motives for airing these allegations. As a whistleblower, he is seeking a percentage of any federal tax recovery. He is also fighting embezzlement charges by his former employer. Since 2007, the company has been providing information about Jannuzzo to authorities in Cobb County, Ga., where Glock’s American subsidiary is based. The Cobb County District Attorney’s Office is prosecuting Jannuzzo—who once represented the company at a White House Rose Garden ceremony and on CBS’ (CBS) 60 Minutes—for siphoning corporate money into a Cayman Islands account. Jannuzzo, who left the company in 2003, claims he’s the victim of a vendetta.

Speaking on behalf of the company and Gaston Glock, Carlos Guevara, the general counsel of Glock Inc. in the U.S., said in a written statement: “Glock has acted lawfully and properly throughout its history. Unfortunately, Glock was victimized by several former employees and fiduciaries,” including Ewert and Jannuzzo. “The Glock companies are exceptionally well-run and managed. Glock’s tax filings and reporting are accurate.”

Still, eyebrow-raising goings-on appear to have been standard at Glock. After the attempt on Gaston Glock’s life, an internal investigation conducted at his instruction turned up documents apparently showing that a Glock affiliate in Panama helped in 1995 to start a bank called Unibank Offshore in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. Unibank’s co-founder was an alleged money launderer named Hakki Yaman Namli.

In the U.S., Jannuzzo and another former Glock executive, Peter S. Manown, have claimed that for years they distributed company funds to their wives and Glock employees with the understanding that the money would be donated to congressional candidates—an apparent violation of U.S. election law. The ex-executives, who say they acted with Gaston Glock’s approval, have estimated the total amount in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Buttressing this allegation are ledger entries and cancelled checks. Guevara, the company lawyer, said: “Glock has never authorized, and would never authorize, any act that would violate U.S. campaign finance laws.”

Glock’s political and public relations activities in the U.S. sometimes have tended toward strangeness. Internal records show payments of thousands of dollars a month over several years to a gun industry lobbyist named Richard Feldman. In interviews, Feldman says that at Gaston Glock’s request he spent some of the money in 1999 and 2000 to arrange U.S. appearances by Jörg Haider, then the leader of Austria’s anti-immigrant, far-right Freedom Party. Glock has been described in Austria as a political supporter of Haider, although the arms maker has sued both an Austrian newspaper and a politician there for making that claim. The arrangements Feldman says he worked on included Haider’s attendance at a January 2000 banquet in New York honoring the birthday of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. The King dinner, sponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality, received media coverage because Hillary Clinton criticized her then-rival for a New York Senate seat, Rudolph Giuliani, for attending the celebration Haider present.

Before he died in a car accident last year, Haider stirred controversy, according to media reports, for praising the “character” of elite Nazi SS troops and the “employment policy” of Adolph Hitler. “Glock urged me to help Haider overcome some of the [image] problems,” says Feldman. The lobbyist says he thoroughly researched the situation to satisfy himself that neither Glock nor Haider ever supported the Nazi cause. “There were loose statements [by Haider] that were blown out of proportion,” he says.

Glock’s Guevara did not respond to questions about the company’s or Gaston Glock’s relationship with Haider.

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In recent years, the gun company’s U.S. operation has been rattled by scandal. Local authorities in Georgia have prosecuted Jannuzzo and fellow former executive Peter Manown at the behest of their former employer. On Oct. 18, 2007, Manown, an attorney who handled many of Gaston Glock’s personal matters in the U.S., testified that he and Jannuzzo had embezzled company funds and funneled the money to accounts in the Cayman Islands. He said the pair also skimmed money from Glock real estate transactions. And Manown said he and Jannuzzo had withdrawn more than $500,000 from Glock accounts for political campaign contributions from 1993 to at least 2003. The executives put some of that cash in their own pockets, he testified. “There was so much money flying around in this company,” Manown said. “It was like Monopoly money.” He recounted confessing his transgressions privately to Gaston Glock back in 2003 and repaying some of the stolen money. The former Glock executive pled guilty in 2008 to theft and received a suspended 10-year sentence.

In connection with the campaign contributions, Manown testified that Gaston Glock knew what his underlings were doing: “This was all done with Mr. Glock’s blessing.” Manown said he and Jannuzzo would withdraw cash for political contributions from a Glock account at the since-closed Summit Bank (SBGA) in Atlanta. Sometimes the Glock executives withdrew “$9,000 so it would stay under the reporting radar of the bank,” Manown said. He was referring to the federal anti-money laundering rule that requires banks to report to the Treasury Dept. any cash withdrawal of $10,000 or more. Purposely evading the requirement is a federal crime punishable by up to five years in prison.