Note, this post is from 2011.
A husband-wife tax preparation team from Clive, and their three businesses, have been permanently barred from preparing tax returns again. From the Department of Justice press release:
A federal court has permanently barred Howard Musin, his wife Jill Schwartz-Musin and their three companies from preparing federal tax returns for others, the Justice Department announced today. The three businesses named in the court’s civil injunction order are SSC Services Inc., M-S Services Inc. and Schwartz’s Systems Corporation.
The 40-page court opinion contained a long list of transgressions committed by the Musins in preparing tax returns and advising clients. It would take many blog posts to summarize the “creative” things the Musins did on their client’s tax returns. The DOJ press release provides a brief summary:
Following an eight-day trial, U.S. District Court Judge John A. Jarvey found that the defendants engaged in a wide variety of misconduct in preparing tax returns for their customers, many of which were distributors for Shaklee Corporation, a large multi-level marketing firm. According to court documents, the couple improperly claimed business expense deductions on customers’ returns for costs of personal items . Court documents also state that the Musins attempted to hide their improper deductions, including disguising nearly $70,000 in personal cattery expenses for a customer who bred cats as a hobby by listing them as business expenses of the customer’s computer consulting business.
According to evidence presented at trial, Schwartz-Musin worked for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) from 1972 to 1978, and for part of that time she was a criminal investigator. The complaint alleges that Schwartz-Musin became a tax return preparer in 1982 and, in 2000, pleaded guilty to one criminal count of obstructing the administration of the tax laws. The court found that, the earlier criminal conviction notwithstanding, the defendants created and submitted a backdated, false form to the IRS during a customer audit in 2006 in a fraudulent attempt to justify an improper deduction.
