A Houston tax preparer is headed to the slammer for concocting a fraud that cost Uncle Sam more than $300K. Lynettia Profit, who ran JNL Tax Services, was hit with a 12-month-and-a-day sentence plus a year of supervised release after pleading guilty to cooking the books on behalf of her clients from 2016 to 2019.

Lynettia's handiwork included fabricating education credits and jackin' up expenses to score some hefty refunds. The scheme left the government out of pocket for a cool $22,101 for just one of these phony filings, as U.S. Attorney Alamdar S. Hamdani's office detailed. In one instance, she prepped a return chock full of false deductions totalling $70,743 in expenses—including a duplicitous $2,500 education credits—all in the name of inflating refunds.

On top of her prison time, federal Judge Lee H Rosenthal told Profit to cough up $336,847 in restitution for her financial shenanigans, according to The U.S. Attorney's Office. The scam artist's downfall was sealed when she filed fraudulent returns even for an undercover agent in February 2020.

But don't expect Profit to swap her calculator for a prison jumpsuit just yet—she's still roaming free on bond and will turn herself in to a yet-to-be-decided federal pen at a later date. The case, brought to a close after an IRS Criminal Investigation, was driven home by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Brad Gray and Andrew Swartz, who uncovered the full extent of Profit's fraudulent tax preparation services.