The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Indiana has issued an order permanently barring Daniel Bewley, a former Hobart and Lake Station, Indiana, tax preparer, from preparing federal tax returns for others, the Justice Department announced today. Bewley consented to the civil injunction order.

According to the complaint, Bewley operated a business that provided tax return preparation services under the names Bewley’s Tax Service and Forward Motion Tax Service. The complaint alleges that Bewley prepared returns that falsely understated the tax due by including false Schedules C that understated the amount of the customer’s income and false Schedules A that contained inflated deductions. The complaint further alleges that Bewley prepared approximately 1,602 tax returns for tax years 2011 through 2014, and that an IRS examination of 208 of those returns determined that 75 percent of the returns falsely understated the amount of tax due.

As set out in the complaint, on Aug. 11, 2017, Bewley pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud and one count of filing a false tax return in connection with his tax preparation activities, for which he was sentenced to 33 months of imprisonment, and was ordered to serve three years of supervised release and to pay approximately $331,000 in restitution to the United States.

Return preparer fraud is one of the IRS’s Dirty Dozen Tax Scams for 2019. Taxpayers seeking a return preparer should remain vigilant. The IRS has information on its website for choosing a return preparer and has launched a free directory of federal tax preparers.

In the past decade, the Justice Department’s Tax Division has obtained injunctions against hundreds of tax fraud promoters and unscrupulous tax preparers. Information about these cases is available on the Justice Department’s website. An alphabetical listing of persons enjoined from preparing returns and promoting tax schemes can be found on this page. If you believe that one of the enjoined persons or businesses may be violating an injunction, please contact the Tax Division with details.