Two Atlanta-area tax preparers have been permanently pushed out of the business after federal authorities accused them of fabricating returns and pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars in improper fees. The lifetime ban caps a civil enforcement push that forced the pair to give up $600,000 in what officials describe as ill-gotten gains and sends a pointed warning to anyone tempted to turn tax season into a personal payday.
The case, which unfolded in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, shows how a seemingly routine storefront operation can morph into a large-scale scheme that distorts refunds, misleads clients and drains public revenue. It also illustrates how aggressive civil tools, including injunctions and disgorgement, are becoming central to the government’s strategy for policing the tax preparation industry.
How a neighborhood tax shop became a $600K problem
According to federal court filings, the Atlanta preparers built their business by promising bigger refunds, then delivered those results by manipulating the numbers on client returns. Investigators alleged that the firm repeatedly falsified income details, deductions and credits, inflating refunds that taxpayers were not actually entitled to receive. The pattern was serious enough that the government moved to shut the operation down and recover roughly $600,000 that the preparers had collected as fees tied to those inflated filings, a sum they ultimately agreed to pay back as part of a broader resolution of the case, described in a civil announcement.
The scale of the misconduct prompted the District Court for the Northern District of Georgia to issue a permanent injunction that bars the defendants from preparing federal tax returns for anyone other than themselves. That order, detailed in a separate court summary, also blocks them from working for, training or advising any other person or entity in the tax preparation business. In practical terms, that means the shop is not just closed, it is dismantled, with no path for the owners to quietly reenter the market under a different banner.
The Justice Department’s playbook: sue, shut down, and signal
The Georgia case did not appear out of nowhere. It followed a pattern in which The Justice Department uses civil complaints to target preparers it believes are gaming the system, then asks federal judges to halt their operations. Earlier in the enforcement arc, The Justice Department filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia that laid out how the Atlanta firm allegedly fabricated income, dependents and filing status to generate larger refunds, a strategy described in detail in a civil complaint. That filing set the stage for the permanent injunction that followed…