A tax preparer, who sent more than $300,000 to his native Cameroon, to pay for apartment building construction, has been sentenced to one year and one day in prison for tax filing fraud. Jean Mpouli of Seattle, Wash., who was convicted of four counts of aiding and abetting the filing of false tax returns caused the government a tax loss of $3.5 million.Mpouli, age 58, ran a tax preparation business on the side, primarily serving African immigrants, while he was an aviation inspector with the Federal Aviation Administration. A three-day trial also determined he more than $200,000 in revenue from that source.
The Internal Revenue Service said one of its analysts spotted an unusual number of unreimbursed business expenses on returns filed by Mpouli in 2017. Calls to clients showed they were unaware of the amount of deductions he claimed, particularly for unreimbursed business expenses, spotted by an IRS analyst in 2016. In one example, Mpouli claimed a client had driven more than 33,000 miles for business in one year, even though that client did not own a vehicle, did not have a driver’s license, and had never driven a vehicle in the U.S.
During the time of the fraud, Mpouli was sending more than $300,000 to his native Cameroon to pay for the construction of an apartment building.
In 2017, the IRS Criminal Investigation Division sent an undercover officer into the business to get an up-close look at how Mpouli prepared tax returns. Using the W-2 information the undercover officer supplied, Mpouli rightly determined the agent owed approximately $800 in taxes. However, Mpouli then entered approximately $34,000 in fraudulent expenses in order to boost the undercover officer’s refund to more than $5,600. Mpouli explained that the undercover officer should consider the refund as a “loan” in the event of an IRS audit. Mpouli then accepted $250 in cash as his fee for preparing the fraudulent return.
