"

Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 53 seconds

Preparer Pleads in $11.8M PPP Scam

Justice statue A California tax preparer has become the third defendant to plead guilty in a falsely obtaining at least $11.8 million in Paycheck Protection Program loans. Thanh Ngoc Rudin, 58, a principal in Mana Tax Services, also pleaded guilty this month  to filing bogus returns on behalf of at least nine professional athletes.

Rudin’s brother, Quin Ngoc Rudin, and Seir Havana have already pleaded guilty to preparing and filing false income tax returns for at least nine professional athletes.

The fraudulent returns were prepared for the athletes from June 2019 through 2021. The conspirators fabricated personal expenses and businesses losses and told the athletes they could amend prior-year returns to correct purported errors made by the previous preparers to obtain additional refunds with Mana charging a fee of 30-percent of any refund received.

The conspirators also applied for PPP loans for small businesses that were shell companies employing few or no employees that they controlled and for business entities controlled by others. They were described as having “grossly inflated” the number of employees and monthly payroll costs used in the loan application and created fake tax returns to support these. They charged 30 percent of the value of the loan received for processing the applications.

The government seized more than $11.8 million in PPP loan proceeds from bank accounts the defendants controlled, Havana also surrendered cashier’s checks of about $5.6 million, a portion of the fees charge the athletes and apportion of those charge for obtaining the loans. 

The total loss to the government was more than $25 million

Bob Scott
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
Read 906 times
Rate this item
(0 votes)

Visit other PMG Sites:

Template Settings

Color

For each color, the params below will give default values
Tomato Green Blue Cyan Dark_Red Dark_Blue

Body

Background Color
Text Color

Header

Background Color

Footer

Select menu
Google Font
Body Font-size
Body Font-family
Direction
PMG360 is committed to protecting the privacy of the personal data we collect from our subscribers/agents/customers/exhibitors and sponsors. On May 25th, the European's GDPR policy will be enforced. Nothing is changing about your current settings or how your information is processed, however, we have made a few changes. We have updated our Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy to make it easier for you to understand what information we collect, how and why we collect it.