A 41-year-old Coto de Caza woman who ran a Long Beach tax preparation business was sentenced this week to a year in prison, a year of supervised release and an order to pay $103,736 to the IRS in restitution.
Rathana Ung, the former director and officer of Lim's Income Tax and Lim's Tax Inc., drew that sentence from U.S. District Court Judge Beverly Reid O'Connell for aiding in the preparation of at least 60 false federal income tax returns.
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The 1040 forms that were filed with the IRS from 2006 to 2010 included false deductions and phony business losses, according to a statement from Bruce Riordan of the U.S. Attorney's office in Los Angeles. Ung admitted in court on July 1 that she knew that the taxpayers for whom the returns were filed were not entitled to claim such deductions when she pleaded guilty to a count of filing a false federal income tax return.
Ung added in a written plea agreement that she prepared the false returns so that she could obtain more clients by earning a reputation in the community as a return preparer who would secure large refunds for her clients.
Not being able to prepare tax returns for anyone other than herself or her spouse is one condition of her supervised release, according to Riordan.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.