Florida men plead guilty to $3M fraudulent tax return scheme

Three men from Florida are facing jail time after an Internal Revenue Service investigation uncovered fraudulently claimed tax refunds.

Two of the men - Christopher Johnson, of Orlando, Florida, and Jasen Harvey, of Tampa, Florida – pleaded guilty this week of conspiring to defraud the United States by promoting a tax fraud scheme.

The ‘Note Program’ offered clients the opportunity to have tax returns prepared by Harvey and others, claiming large non-existent income tax withholdings had been paid to the IRS and requesting refunds. The duo promoted the scheme from 2015 to 2018 and charged clients a fee and a percentage of their fraudulently claimed refunds.

The IRS paid out $1.5 million of the more than $3 million that had been claimed.  

Johnson was paid more than $200,000 in 2016 and more than $100,000 in 2017 as his share of the proceeds from the scheme, although even this was not correctly reported to the IRS resulting in a tax loss of $78,259.

The third man - Arthur Grimes, of Ocoee and Orlando, Florida –pleaded guilty in April to obstructing the IRS when he was found to have filed four false claims and submitted false documents when the IRS tried to recover the refunds. He will be sentenced in November with a potential maximum sentence of three years in jail.

Johnson and Harvey will be sentenced later and could face up to five years in jail. All three defendants also face a period of supervised release, restitution and monetary penalties.