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.
Bob Scott has provided information to the tax and accounting community since 1991, first as technology editor of Accounting Today, and from 1997 through 2009 as editor of its sister publication, Accounting Technology. He is known throughout the industry for his depth of knowledge and for his high journalistic standards. Scott has made frequent appearances as a speaker, moderator and panelist and events serving tax and accounting professionals. He has a strong background in computer journalism as an editor with two former trade publications, Computer+Software News and MIS Week and spent several years with weekly and daily newspapers in Morris County New Jersey prior to that. A graduate of Indiana University with a degree in journalism, Bob is a native of Madison, Ind