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THAT WOULD BE A LOT OF PHONE CALLS

June 11, 2007

The IRS program to issue refunds of the discredited telephone excise tax seems to have spawned a mini-industry of bogus refund claim preparers. Unfortunately for them, refund fraud isn't all peaches and cream.

Take Riverside, California preparers Peaches Mercer Turner and Alejandro Berdin. From a Justice Department release:

According to the indictment, Turner and Berdin prepared and filed income tax returns for 2005 and 2006 that claimed false credits based on the Telephone Excise Tax Refund (TETR) or the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)... The indictment alleges that the total amount of false claims exceeded $600,000; one return alone claimed a $140,604 refund based upon a $137,228 TETR credit.

Joining Peaches in the bad graces of the tax law is Dallas preparer Herbert Jena, who with an other defendant is accused of filing 1200 bad claims for excise tax refunds. They operated a tax service called "Jackson Hubbert." Certainly any phonetic similarity to Jackson Hewitt is coincidental. If the tax business doesn't work out, maybe they'll open a "McRonalds" hamburger restaurant under its distinctive "golden rainbows."

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