Florida Prisoner Caught Filing Fraudulent Federal Income Tax Returns

It seems that prison isn’t a good enough reason to keep you from cheating on your federal income tax.

WJHG (Source Below) has reported that Michael William Joseph III, an inmate of the Apalachee Correctional Institution in Florida, has pleaded guilty for filing fraudulent federal income tax returns to the IRS. This wouldn’t be Joseph’s first conviction of tax fraud, however. He has been serving time for faking federal income tax returns dating all the way back to 2006.

Prison, however, hasn’t kept Joseph from trying to scam the government with some fake federal income tax returns. He had filled out a series of tax forms with fabricated amounts of income and deductions. He had used the identities of his co-inmates in order to validate his returns. The illegitimately refunded federal income tax would then be deposited to various accounts he had control over.

What had tipped off Joseph’s tax scam was the size of his illegal refunds. Joseph had sought a total of nearly $180,000 in federal income tax returns. For a time it seemed that Joseph had managed to pull his scheme off when the government cashed him out for an alleged $50,000.

But investigators quickly got wind of his scam and successfully retrieved over $17,500 of the unlawfully refunded federal income tax from his personal bank account. An additional $11,600 was found in the mother’s ex-husband’s backyard.

The fifty three year old Joseph was indicted on various charges including but not limited to filing false federal income tax returns. Other charges include theft and mail fraud, amounting to a prison sentence of up to twenty years.