Toney Fields, Tax Evasion, Tennessee 2011

Mo’ Money Taxes tax preparation office in Nashville, Tennessee has been shut down by the United States government due to alleged fraudulent activities. Toney Fields, the Mo’ Money Taxes licensee, and co-defendant Trumekia Shaw have been accused of intentionally preparing and filing false federal income tax returns to obtain improper tax refunds for their customers.

According to the complaint, Fields and Shaw have been using customers’ end-of-year pay stubs to prepare tax returns before employers have issued Internal Revenue Service (IRS) W-2 wage-statement forms to employees. This violates IRS rules, as preparing tax returns based on pay stubs rather than proper W-2 Forms is not allowed.

The lawsuit alleges that Fields and Shaw use the pay stubs to create fake W-2 Forms to include with the returns. End-of-the-year pay stubs frequently omit income and distributions that are shown on employer-issued W-2 Forms, resulting in errors on federal tax returns.

The complaint also claims that Fields and Shaw inflate or claim false tax credits on customers’ tax returns. They allegedly claim improper dependent exemptions in order to claim inflated earned-income credits or child tax credits for their customers.

The suit also alleges that the defendants include false filing statuses and bogus claims for charitable contributions on customers’ returns. The government estimates that the defendants’ misconduct may have caused revenue losses of more than $5 million from the more than 1,100 tax returns they prepared in 2011.

The IRS lists return preparer fraud as one of its ‘Dirty Dozen’ tax scams. The Justice Department’s Tax Division has obtained injunctions against hundreds of tax-return preparers and tax-fraud promoters in the past decade.

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