A Louisiana woman, already waiting to be sentenced in one fraud scheme, has pleaded guilty in a second. Brittany Patterson of Jefferson Parish, La., now awaits sentencing in two cases in which she prepared fake returns for others and claimed a fake dependent for herself in one instance.
Patterson is scheduled to be sentenced on January 5 after pleading guilty to conspiracy to defraud the United States. From January through April 2015, Patterson admitted she and others conspired to file false returns for Pelicans Income Tax and Payroll Services, located in Kenner and Westwego, La. She used false income and withholdings to inflate client returns.
Paterson also prepared her own return utilizing a dependent’s personal identifying information from a client without the client’s knowledge.
The Internal Revenue Service said she and others caused a tax loss of more than $550,000.
Patterson was already facing sentencing this week after pleading guilty on Nov. 14, 2019 to a conspiracy charge for filing bogus returns for clients of Crown Tax Service She faces a maximum of five years in the prison on the newest charge.
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