A Georgia woman was sentenced to 51 months in prison today for conspiring to defraud the United States by promoting a nationwide tax fraud scheme involving more than 200 participants in at least 19 states.
According to court documents and statements made in court, Yomarie Febres, of Covington, prepared 77 false income tax returns that collectively sought more than $23.8 million in tax refunds from the IRS. Between 2014 and 2016, Febres’s co-conspirators held seminars throughout the country where they promoted the scheme and recruited clients to file false tax returns with the IRS by telling them that their mortgages and other debts entitled them to refunds. Information collected from clients was then provided to Febres for use in the preparation of false tax returns. The tax returns that Febres prepared falsely claimed that banks and other financial institutions had withheld large amounts of income taxes from the clients, which entitled the clients to refunds. In reality, the financial institutions had not paid any income to or withheld any taxes from the clients. The false returns Febres prepared caused the IRS to pay out more than $15 million in fraudulent refunds to scheme participants. Febres concealed her role in the scheme by falsely reporting that all of the returns were “self-prepared,” when she had actually created them.
Febres admitted that her co-conspirators charged clients approximately $10,000 to $15,000 in fees to participate in the scheme. Febres…
