A California man has copped to cooking the books and is now facing up to ten years behind bars. Richard Jason Mountford, from the Golden State, admitted in court that he orchestrated a scheme to defraud Uncle Sam to the tune of over $800,000 by filing phony tax returns.
Mountford and his associate falsely claimed they worked for a make-believe company, falsely reporting wages and withheld taxes to trick the IRS into coughing up refunds they didn’t deserve. According to the Department of Justice, from 2016 to 2020, these con artists also reported fake alimony payments to pump up the refund amount. The falsified returns prompted the IRS to issue them $873,723.53 in refunds, a hefty sum that funded a nearly $360,000 spending spree on new cars.
Mountford, now awaiting his sentencing, stacked his own accounts with $757,075.53 and showcased his gratitude to his co-fraudster with a share of $170,000 in cold hard cash and, oddly enough, gold bars. His day of reckoning is set for April 11, when federal Judge Troy L. Nunley will decide his fate.
IRS Criminal Investigation sniffed out this game of deceit while trial attorneys John C. Gerardi and Charles A. O’Reilly of the Tax Division, along with Assistant U.S. Attorney Dhruv M. Sharma, are on the legal offensive. The gravity of Mountford's financial shenanigans will be weighed by the judge, who will take the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines among other statutory factors into consideration.
