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DON'T MOST BABYSITTERS DRIVE 676 MILES EVERY DAY?

December 28, 2006

They used to hold a flea market at the old Waukegan Drive-in theater near where I grew up. I remember finding treasures like used dictaphone machines and primitive adding devices that I would take home and try to operate. One thing I never saw there was a tax return preparer. Maybe I just wasn't looking in the right flea market.

A Department of Justice Press Release has the story (emphasis mine):

JUSTICE DEPARTMENT ASKS FEDERAL COURT TO BAR FLEA MARKET TAX PREPARER FROM PREPARING FEDERAL TAX RETURNS FOR OTHERS

Florida Woman Allegedly Promotes Scam Claiming Bogus Fuel Tax Credits for Customers

WASHINGTON - The Justice Department announced today that it has sued a federal income tax preparer in U.S. District Court in Miami seeking to bar her from preparing tax returns for others. According to the government’s civil injunction complaint, Tashanna McFarland of Miramar, Fla., prepared federal tax returns claiming fraudulent fuel tax credits, a scam that the complaint explains is a serious enforcement problem for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The suit alleges that McFarland operates her tax preparation business out of a booth at a flea market in Miami.

Your honor, that's not a booth, technically. It's a card table!

Federal law imposes a fuel tax on gasoline and diesel fuel sold in the United States. The tax is included in the purchase price at the pump. Businesses can claim a fuel tax credit in certain rare circumstances, but most businesses and consumers who use cars or trucks on roads and highways are not eligible for the credit. According to the government’s complaint, McFarland claimed the fuel credit on her customers’ returns so they could claim tax refunds to which they were not entitled.

If they'd just call it an "ethanol credit," maybe that makes it ok?

The complaint says that on a return for one customer—a babysitter—McFarland claimed that the customer purchased 16,451 gallons of gasoline for business-related purposes. The suit notes that for such a claim to be accurate, the babysitter (whose total income for the year was $9,316) would have had to spend approximately $36,192 for gasoline that year—nearly four times her total income—and would had to have driven approximately 246,765 miles during the year, an average of 676 miles each day, seven days a week.

What do you expect? Good sitters are few and far between. Still, that doesn't sound right; it's the parents that would drive that far for a sitter, not the other way around.

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