Fake trusts supercharge tax refund fraud; Milwaukee woman charged with getting $3.25 million from IRS
There was a time in Milwaukee when thieves used other people's identities to file false returns to steal refunds totaling anywhere from a few hundred bucks to thousands of dollars.
As the IRS tried to crack down on so-called Stolen Identity Refund Fraud, or SIRF, thieves seem to have supercharged the scam by turning to filing fake returns for trusts.
In the latest case, a Milwaukee woman has been charged with filing a pair of returns seeking refunds of $13 million. She, like others, didn't get it all, but still managed to have the IRS send her a check for $3.25 million, money prosecutors now will try to take back.
Janeen Rogers, 54, is charged with wire fraud, engaging in an unlawful monetary transaction and filing a false claim. Her initial appearance in federal court is scheduled for May 25.
According to an indictment:
From the fall of 2019 to March 2020, Rogers prepared tax returns for two entities for the years 2017 and 2018, using commercial tax preparation software. Only one entity is identified, as the Noble Sun Trust. She falsified the income earned, taxes withheld and refunds they were entitled to, before having the refunds transferred to a bank account she controlled.
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The indictment says the two returns sought refunds totaling $13 million. A return she filed in November 2019 for Noble Sun Trust, for the tax year 2017, claimed a refund of $3.25 million, and the IRS mailed Rogers a refund check.
In January 2020, Rogers caused a check for $32,101.44 to be drawn from the Noble Sun Trust account at JP Morgan Chase bank and to be sent to CarMax to purchase a 2017 GMC Acadia Denali.
The government seeks forfeiture of any money Rogers obtained via the scheme, or other assets obtained with proceeds of the scheme, including the vehicle purchased from CarMax.
In a similar case from 2019, federal prosecutors say Francis Burns filed fake returns for his own Francis Burns Trust seeking some $82 million in refunds. In his case, the IRS only sent him about $3.7 million before someone caught on and rejected his subsequent attempts to "amend" the returns and seek even greater refunds.
With the money he stole, prosecutors say, Burns bought a $750,000 house in Chicago and $70,000 Mercedes limousine from Las Vegas. They say Burns posted about his tax activities on Facebook, even a photo of his big refund check and that he had become a millionaire.
Burns has been defending himself for much of the pending case. His pleadings suggest he believes he is a "sovereign citizen" not subject to American courts, and featured convoluted, pseudo-legal ramblings, and are often signed with a red thumb print.
In Georgia in 2020, federal prosecutors charged Marquet Antwain Burgess Mattox, who used several aliases and filed false returns for a dozen different trusts seeking more than $165 million in refunds. He obtained more than $5 million in a pair of refunds on fake trusts.
Mattox, who acted as his own attorney and tried to engage several common legal defenses of the Moorish Sovereign Citizen movement, was convicted by a jury in August and is awaiting sentencing.
Several of the fake trusts Mattox filed had names commonly used by members of the Moorish National Republic or Moorish Sovereign Citizen movement.
The trust in the latest Milwaukee case was called Noble Sun Trust. A man who listed himself as a trustee, Terry LeNoir, claimed in an eviction case to be a sovereign citizen and a member of the Moorish National Republic. He could not be reached for this story.
The Southern Poverty Law Center describes Moorish Sovereign Citizens as anti-government groups and individuals who believe African-Americans constitute an elite class immune from American laws, and who often engage in "paper terrorism" with various government officials via bogus legal filings.
A pair of IRS spokespersons said they were not familiar with trust tax return fraud as charged in the three cases being any kind of trend, and did not have immediate access to statistics about the problem. Federal prosecutors in Milwaukee and Washington, D.C., declined to discuss the cases or the general nature of the fraud.
Contact Bruce Vielmetti at (414) 224-2187 or bvielmetti@jrn.com. Follow him on Twitter at @ProofHearsay.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Milwaukee woman charged for $3 million fake trust tax return
