A North Carolina tax preparing has been sentenced to 41 months in prison for tax fraud in which he trained employees to prepare fraudulent returns. Joseph Octave, 49, also told employees not to give clients copies of their own returns.The government reported a tax loss of $2.5 million
Octave and his employees at Kapital Financial Services in Charlotte, N.C. prepared hundreds of fraudulent returns from 2014 through 2019.Employees were taught several methods of inflating client refunds and in avoiding IRS detection. They were also provided with scripts and cheat sheets.
Besides instructing employees not to provide returns to clients, they were also told not to share any details beyond the total amount of refunds. Most fees were taken from the refund with clients often unaware how much they were being charged.
With Octave taking the largest part, Kapital earned at least $700,000 in fees for preparing these returns.
