Federal Court in Los Angeles Bars California Man from Preparing Federal Tax Returns for Others

WASHINGTON – A federal court in Los Angeles has permanently barred Benjamin Aparicio from preparing federal tax returns for others, the Justice Department announced today. The civil injunction order, to which Aparicio consented, was signed by Judge R. Gary Klausner of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.

According to the government complaint, Aparicio, a resident of Fillmore, Calif., who conducted business as BA Income Services in Santa Paula, Calif., engaged in a pattern of claiming false and inflated tax deductions for his customers. The government also alleged that Aparicio advised his customers to form limited liability companies that had no business purpose and subsequently prepared tax returns that used the sham business entities to deduct his customers’ personal expenses. According to the complaint, a sample of 53 returns prepared by Aparicio for tax years 2002 through 2005 and audited by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) resulted in understated tax liabilities of more than $400,000.

According to the complaint, on October 25, 2010, Aparicio pleaded guilty to three counts of a 17-count federal indictment charging him with, among other things, aiding and assisting in the preparation of false income tax returns. The complaint states that on April 18, 2011, Aparicio was sentenced to 18 months in prison, three years of supervised release and restitution in the amount of $357,100.

Return preparer fraud is one of the IRS’s“Dirty Dozen” tax scams for 2011.  In the past 10 years, the Justice Department’s Tax Division has obtained injunctions against hundreds of tax return preparers and tax fraud promoters. Information about these cases is available on the Justice Department website.