$100 million tax return was God’s will, man told Georgia jury. Now he’s prison-bound
A Georgia man accused of filing a fake tax return for more than $100 million told the court he consulted with a higher power.
But a judge saw his transgression and sentenced him to prison, prosecutors said.
The 70-year-old man was convicted Tuesday, March 7, after being accused of filing a false statement, The Augusta Chronicle reported, citing the city district attorney’s office. Superior Court Judge John Flythe later handed him a five-year prison sentence.
Prosecutors accused the man of filing a 2017 tax return for $100,000,689 on March 15, 2019, according to WJBF. They said he then kept calling the state’s Department of Revenue office demanding payment for the return he knew he wasn’t entitled to.
McClatchy News reached out to the Augusta District Attorney’s Office on March 10 and was awaiting a response.
During the trial, the man told jurors he was “acting righteously in God’s eyes” and that they “would have to answer to God” if they convicted him, according to WFXG. The jury returned with a guilty verdict 14 minutes later.
Tax evasion, including return preparer fraud, is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine, according to the Internal Revenue Service.
“Taxpayers should be as careful as they would be in choosing a doctor or a lawyer,” officials said. “It is important to know that even if someone else prepares a tax return, the taxpayer is ultimately responsible for all the information on the tax return.
Prosecutors said this isn’t the first time the Augusta man has been accused of fraud.
In 2017, a federal court in Maryland convicted him on accusations of preparing tax returns for immigrants, in which he “used their identities to claim them as dependents” on his own taxes, WJBF and WFXG reported.
Augusta is 145 miles east of Atlanta.
This story was originally published March 10, 2023 at 11:07 AM.