Two Broward County, Fla., preparers must pay slightly more than $2.5 million to the Internal Revenue Service. Luzcor Fertilien, 39, was sentenced to 30 months in prison and his former partner, David Joseph, 37, drew a two-year prison term in a scheme that the Justice Department said cost the government $1 million in lost taxes.Fertilien must pay the IRS $1,038,129 in restitution to the IRS, while Joseph was ordered to pay $1,289,351 in restitution.
The sentences followed their previous guilty pleas to conspiring to defraud the United States and filing fraudulent tax returns. Fertilien and Joseph also did not report the illegal proceeds they received from this scheme on their personal tax returns.
The two, along with Frantz Petit-Dos, owned two tax preparation businesses in Lauderhill, Florida: Imperial Taxation and Multi-Services Corp. and Aleluya Universal Accounting Services. From about 2010 through 2016, the three men were found to have used a variety of techniques to inflate refunds, including the use of the identifies of deceased individuals and those whose identities were stolen as dependent on client returns.
Pet it-Dos is scheduled to be sentenced on October 6.