Three men from Florida have pleaded guilty to an elaborate tax-refund scheme that attempted to defraud the IRS.
Christopher Johnson and Jasen Harvey pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the United States. This added to the guilty plea of Arthur Grimes on April 2 to obstructing the IRS in connection with the same tax scheme.
Three Florida men plead guilty to millions of dollars of tax fraud
The announcement of the guilty plea was made by Acting Deputy Assistant Attorney General Stuart M. Goldberg of the Justice Department’s Tax Division and U.S. Attorney Roger B. Handberg for the Middle District of Florida.
According to the documents provided by the Justice Department, the group acted across a three-year spell. From 2015 to 2018, Harvey and Johnson would prepare “tax returns for clients that claimed large nonexistent income tax withholdings had been paid to the IRS, and sought large refunds based on those purported withholdings. The conspirators charged clients fees and required them to pay over a portion of the fraudulently obtained refunds.”
Grime’s part in the scheme, which he pleaded guilty to, involved four false tax returns, prepared by Harvey. The IRS attempted to reclaim a refund, which was falsely allocated to Grimes, to which he gave false statements and information to the government’s tax watchdog. Grimes would also funnel the refunded cash to a nominated bank account.
Johnson also gave false information to the IRS for the tax years 2016 and 2017 respectively. He would not report income for both of these years. He would, according to the report, take in “$200,000 in 2016 and more than $100,000 in 2017 as his share of the proceeds from the scheme. Johnson filed false tax returns for those years that did not report that income, resulting in a tax loss of $78,259.”
Johnson and Harvey face a five-year prison sentence as a maximum penalty, but have yet to be given a date to hear their fate. Grimes’ fate will be decided on November 12, 2024, and faces a possible three year sentence for the tax obstruction charge.
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