WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Justice Department announced today that a federal court in Ft. Lauderdale has barred two Florida tax preparers, Jean-Marie Boucicaut and Marie Thelemarque, from preparing federal income tax returns for others. The government complaint alleges that while the two are from Orlando, their scheme is targeted at immigrants from Haiti in Broward and Miami-Dade Counties. The civil preliminary injunction order, signed by Chief Judge William J. Zloch of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, also applies to Thelemarque and Boucicaut’s company, Tax Review Corporation. The court order requires Boucicaut and Thelemarque to notify their customers of the injunction and to provide the government a list identifying their customers’ names, addresses, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, and Social Security numbers.
The court held that the defendants continuously and repeatedly prepared and filed tax returns claiming credits and deductions to which the customers were not entitled and that the defendants retained some or all of the erroneous tax refunds claimed on at least 593 tax returns.
More information about this case is available at http://www.usdoj.gov/tax/txdv05186.htm. This suit is part of an ongoing Justice Department and IRS crackdown on preparers of false and fraudulent tax returns. More information about these cases is available at http://www.usdoj.gov/tax/taxpress2005.htm. More information about the Tax Division is available at http://www.usdoj.gov/tax/index.html.
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