Reclamation rip-off; Congolese con; flip this; and other highlights of recent tax cases.
Kenner, Louisiana: Tax preparer Brittany Patterson has been sentenced to a year and a day in prison for conspiring to defraud the U.S. and helping clients file false returns.
Michegel Butler owned Crown Tax Service, where Patterson was a preparer. From about January 2013 through April of that year, Patterson, Butler and others conspired to inflate clients’ refunds by preparing returns claiming false Schedule C businesses, dependents and dependent care expenses. Patterson and the other conspirators directed clients to fill out fraudulent receipts and encouraged some to buy or sell personal ID information of dependents that could be falsely reported on returns.
Patterson, who previously pleaded guilty, was also ordered to serve three years of supervised release and pay some $90,856 in restitution to the United States.
In early 2021, Butler was
Henderson, Nevada: Frederick J. Leavitt, a former official with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, has been sentenced to 30 months in prison for a bribery scheme involving a federal contract and for committing $1.5 million in tax fraud.
Leavitt had been employed by the bureau as director of the financial management office for the Lower Colorado Region. From about February 2015 through about February 2016, Leavitt and co-conspirator Dustin M. Lewis, a CPA employed by the Las Vegas accounting firm L.L. Bradford & Co.,
In a separate fraud, Leavitt and Lewis worked to file fraudulent tax forms for 2013 on behalf of six business entities that claimed more than $11 million in false business deductions. They caused a federal tax loss of more than $1.5 million.
Lewis pleaded guilty in 2020; his sentencing is Aug. 18. Leavitt, who pleaded guilty in 2019, was also ordered to pay $704,002 in restitution.
Jacksonville, Florida: Tax preparer Ali Akhenaten (formerly known as Darryl Oliver) has been found guilty of five counts of tax fraud.
He owned and operated the tax prep business Florida Financial Solutions. On the 2014, 2015 and 2016 returns Akhenaten prepared for the business, he underreported his business income and overstated the rent he had paid for his business property. On returns he filed on his own behalf for 2014 and 2015, he underreported the income he had earned from the business.
He faces a maximum of three years in prison for each count. The government also will seek restitution for the tax loss.
Swampscott, Massachusetts: Boris Shadari, 46, has pleaded guilty in connection with a scheme to defraud the IRS by falsely inflating federal refunds and diverting some of those refunds to accounts he and his conspirators controlled.
He pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to defraud the U.S., three counts of filing a false return, three counts of aiding or assisting in filing a false return, two counts of theft of government funds, five counts of aggravated ID theft and one count of witness tampering.
From 2012 to 2018, Shadari and conspirator Christian Zynga held Shadari out as a tax professional, targeting the Congolese community of greater Boston. Until 2017, they took clients’ information to a tax pro at a tax prep company and provided that professional with false information concerning clients’ dependents, dependent, and child care expenses and business income and losses to inflate the federal refunds. Then they caused the refunds to be split between the clients’ bank accounts and accounts they and their conspirators controlled.
After 2017, Shadari prepared clients’ returns himself and added false information to inflate the refunds. He also failed to report the income he received from this scheme on his own returns.
After Shadari became aware of a federal investigation into the returns, he told a taxpayer to lie to investigators about the information in the returns he had prepared for her and suggested she would owe thousands of dollars back to the IRS and that her immigration status in the U.S. could be compromised.
Conspiracy to defraud the U.S. provides for up to five years in prison and three years of supervised release; filing a false return and aiding or assisting in filing of one carries up to three years in prison and a year of supervised release; theft of government funds carries up to 10 years in prison and three years of supervised release; and witness tampering provides for up to 20 years in prison and three years of supervised release. All four offenses also carry a heavy fine. Aggravated ID theft provides for a mandatory two years in prison, consecutive to any sentence received on the other charges.
Sentencing is July 19. Zynga previously pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to defraud the U.S. and will be sentenced on June 3.
Santa Ana, California: Real estate investor John W. Rampello, who successfully flipped foreclosed homes, has been found guilty of two counts of subscribing to a false individual income tax return and one count of aiding and assisting in the preparation of a false individual income tax return.
Rampello, along with his business partners, was an established and successful property flipper of foreclosed homes since the mid-1990s. During tax years 2014 through 2016, Rampello and his partners flipped some 170 homes; Rampello’s portion of the profits was some $2.1 million. He and his partners kept detailed records of their flipping activities, including the profits Rampello made on each property.
But Rampello concealed this information from his tax preparers and did not tell them that he was involved in the property flipping business. As a result of his omission from his 2014, 2015 and 2016 individual income tax returns, he underreported his federal income taxes by hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Sentencing is June 27, when he will face up to nine years in prison.
Pottsville, Pennsylvania: Erin Hossler, 52, has been sentenced to 15 months in prison for tax evasion.
Hossler stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Borough of Cressona in Schuylkill County, where she previously worked as secretary/treasurer and failed to file income tax returns during 2015, 2016 and 2017.
She stole the money many ways, including having checks issued to herself, forging signatures on checks and using online banking for the borough’s bank accounts to pay her personal bills. She altered records and withheld payment of federal employment taxes for borough employees and altered an audit from an independent accounting firm to make it appear that the firm approved of the borough’s finances.
In 2019, Hossler was charged in state court for these theft offenses and served several months in prison. She pleaded guilty to the federal tax evasion charges in 2021 after her release from state prison and asked the judge for a reduced federal sentence because of the punishment she had received in state court.
The judge responded that 15 months in federal prison was warranted and ordered her to pay $153,539.70 in restitution to the IRS.
Pleasant Hills, Pennsylvania: Walter Tymoczko, 48, has been sentenced to 21 months in prison to be followed by three years of supervised release on his conviction of wire fraud.
Tymoczko was an independent contractor performing accounting work for a local company. From October 2018 to October 2019, he embezzled from the company by utilizing a payroll program, using it multiple times to transfer money from the victim’s bank account to his own account and a family member’s account. He stole a total of $73,206.77.
He also has a previous federal conviction for embezzlement, for which he was sentenced to 24 months in prison and ordered to pay $254,974.60 in restitution.
