PORTLAND – The mystery man whose identity scam derailed a tax-cap referendum drive has been using the identity of a Washington state man for at least seven years, according to court records and interviews.

The man who called himself James Henry Powell has used the name, Social Security number and birth date of James Henry Powell of Puyallup, Wash., on employment applications, tax forms and driver’s license applications.

The theft of Powell’s identity has caused the Internal Revenue Service to send him letters claiming he owed back taxes from jobs he supposedly worked outside his home state. It also has kept him from obtaining credit, said Powell’s wife, Alicia.

She said letters from the IRS began coming in 1995 and indicate that the man posing as Powell has worked dozens of jobs in the South and along the East Coast.

But the impostor does not seem to have tried to harm her husband in any other way, and the family has no idea how he swiped his identity.

“There hasn’t been any illegal activity at this point,” she said. “He hasn’t charged $50,000 worth of junk and tried to say it’s James’.”

The impostor apparently came to Maine in 2000 and worked several odd jobs before answering a newspaper advertisement placed last fall by the Maine Taxpayers Action Network looking for people to gather signatures on petitions to force a tax referendum.

The man collected more than 3,000 signatures, but his deception proved to be the death of the referendum campaign.

A Superior Court justice ruled this week the man lied under oath when he signed a document saying he was a Maine resident.

Justice Thomas Humphrey upheld an earlier ruling by Secretary of State Dan Gwadosky, who threw out the petitions with the signatures the man collected. That left the taxpayers network 2,812 signatures short of the 42,101 the group needed to force the referendum.

An investigation into the impostor’s residency by Michael Pulire, who works for the state attorney general, revealed a trail of false addresses, disconnected phone numbers and short stays in jobs.

The man spent at least part of his time in Maine living at the Sun N’ Sand Motel on King Street in Scarborough.

Paul Marchi, who owns the Sun N’ Sand, told Pulire the man signed a lease in September 2000 and was scheduled to stay until June 2001. But the man broke the lease in January 2001, complaining of health and financial hardships, Marchi told Pulire.

Marchi, who described the man as stocky with salt and pepper hair, told Pulire the man calling himself James Henry Powell claimed to have lived in several states, including California, North Dakota, Tennessee and Arizona.

Marchi told Pulire the man left a forwarding address in Tucson, Ariz., but Pulire said in an affidavit the address turned out to be a shopping center.

Pulire said the man registered to vote in Scarborough in October 2000 by completing an application on which he claimed a post office box in Old Orchard Beach. The application also listed a phone, which turned out to be a cell phone assigned to someone else, Pulire said.

When Pulire called the phone numbers of places the man told Marchi he had worked in Arizona, they were all disconnected.

Alicia Powell said she and her husband, a self-employed building contractor, have learned to live with the hassles of the identity theft.

She said it was difficult the first couple of years to convince the IRS that her husband, who rarely leaves Washington, did not work at places across the country, as IRS records indicated.

She said the IRS now seems satisfied when her husband fills out a form and sends it to the agency – at least until the next letter comes from the IRS and the routine repeats itself.

“We’re used to it,” Alicia Powell said. “We’ve got a pretty good system. They [the IRS] know everything there is to know about it.”