A Rockford woman has entered a guilty plea for her role in preparing and filing fraudulent income tax returns, as per federal court proceedings on Tuesday. Gretchen Alvarez, 49, operated under her business, Sick Credit Repair Tax and Legal Services, where she presented herself as an adept income tax preparer. However, it emerged that Alvarez was not sanctioned with an IRS-issued Preparer Tax Identification Number, a requisite for preparing federal tax returns, as reported by the U.S. Attorney's Office, Northern District of Illinois.
According to the plea agreement, Alvarez admitted to having deliberately misstated taxpayers' eligibility for education tax credits and to having wrongly deducted false business expenses to reduce taxable income for 2019 and 2020. Such acts were aimed at illegally diminishing the tax liabilities of her clients, thus furnishing them with larger refunds than they were due to genuinely receive. "The total tax loss was $356,881.00," as stated by the U.S. Attorney's Office, Northern District of Illinois.
Now, with a guilty plea secured, Alvarez is looking at the possibility of up to three years in federal prison. On top of prison time, she could also be hit with a $100,000 fine for her misconduct. U.S. District Judge Iain D. Johnston has scheduled the sentencing for September 17. Andrew S. Boutros, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, in conjunction with Ramsey E. Covington, the Acting Special Agent-in-Charge of the IRS Criminal Investigation's Chicago Field Office, announced the guilty plea. Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan S. Kim is to represent the government.
