Florida woman accused of claiming false tax credits and deductions, permanently barred from preparing fed IT returns

A federal court has granted a permanent injunction, barring a Pembroke Pines, Florida woman from preparing federal income taxes for others after federal investigators found she falsely claim tax credits and deductions, including the first-time-homebuyer credit, for her customers.

According to the government's 15-page complaint, Dianelys Armengol Guevara had claimed nearly $1 million in homebuyer credits besides misrepresenting the requirements for the credit to her customers, failing to disclose to her customers that a person must actually purchase a home in order to claim the credit, and claiming the credit without her customers' knowledge or against their wishes.

The government has also accused Guevara of failing to identify herself properly as the paid tax return preparer on many of the returns.

Guevara has repeatedly prepared returns for customers which contain false claims for the First-Time Homebuyer Credit, report fictitious wages, report false income and expense items on Schedule C, and fail to properly identify her as the paid preparer, the complaint said.

She allegedly used a fictitious Social Security number to identify herself on hundreds of returns she prepared, the Department of Justice (DOJ) said in a statement.

When Guevara was working with Liberty Tax Service in Hollywood during the 2009 tax filing season, she had allegedly prepared 665 tax returns, claiming a first-time homebuyer's refund on 129 of those.

According to the complaint, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) determined that of the 129 tax returns prepared by Guevara that claimed the credit, at least 90 returns reported an adjusted gross income under $20,000.

Notwithstanding the fact that many of these customers informed Guevara that they had not purchased a home, this absence of income reported on the returns should have alerted Guevara that the customers likely did not have sufficient funds to purchase a home entitling them to the credit, the complaint said.

According to the injunction order, Guevara must provide the IRS with the names of all the people she has prepared tax returns for in the past two years, and also inform those people of the injunction.

Aleksandr Sorsher, former manager at Liberty, said Guevara worked as a tax preparer between 2005 and 2009, and although she was in her early 20s, she had a clean record before the homebuyer tax credit came along.

Sorsher terminated her prior to the 2010 tax filing season, at which time she began preparing customers' federal income tax returns and filing them with the IRS.