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A Redkey woman who falsified hundreds of tax returns without her clients’ knowledge now faces 18 months in prison, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Thursday.
U.S. District Judge James Sweeney sentenced Christina Moles (also known as Tina Lashley), 50, of Redkey after she pleaded guilty to wire fraud and aiding and assisting the making of a false federal income tax return.
Moles has also been ordered to pay $567,010 in restitution, according to a news release.
According to court documents, between 2015 and 2021, Moles executed a tax fraud scheme in which she falsified 382 federal income tax returns for numerous clients without their knowledge.
During this time, Moles was a tax return preparer and frequently attracted customers by advertising that her business would guarantee large refunds. Many of Moles’ customers received between $5,000 to $10,000 in refunds despite having modest incomes.
To increase the amount of refunds her clients would receive, Moles falsely stated that her clients qualified for the American Opportunity Tax Credit.
The AOTC is a credit for qualified education expenses paid for an eligible student for the first four years of higher education.
Taxpayers can get a maximum annual credit of $2,500 per eligible student. To be eligible to claim the AOTC, a taxpayer (or a dependent) must have received a Form 1098-T, Tuition Statement, from an eligible educational institution.
For these false tax returns, Moles claimed that her clients incurred educational expenses to either Ivy Tech or Penn Foster online college.
In reality, none of these clients had any education expenses and did not attend Ivy Tech or Penn Foster. In addition, neither institution provided a Form 1098-T, Tuition Statement, which Moles would have needed to claim qualified educational expenses for her clients.
The defendant’s clients received tax credits to which they were not entitled, and therefore the IRS provided them with larger tax refunds than it should have.
As a result of this scheme, Moles’ clients received tax credits to which they were not entitled, causing a loss to the Internal Revenue Service of approximately $567,010.
“Due to the defendant’s deceit, the United States lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in unjustified refunds,” said John E. Childress, Acting United States Attorney for the Southern District of Indiana, in a news release. “Even more troubling, her unsuspecting customers faced the threat of audits and the repayment of thousands of dollars they wrongly received, all because they trusted her business practices.”
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