I bet good $ most of these morons are NOT American born. Just a hunch. IRS try a 200k fine each, that might send them back where they came from. ----------------------------------------------- New York State tax officials say they have uncovered evidence of significant fraud among professional tax-return preparers in a statewide sting operation in which undercover agents posed as clients. [New York Sting Nabs Tax Preparers] Officials say they're startled not only by the unexpectedly large amounts of tax evasion they witnessed -- such as hiding taxable income and inflating deductions -- but also by the brazen nature of the cheating, which was caught on secret recordings. In one case, for example, a preparer told an undercover investigator: "I did not declare your full gross income from your business because you will pay a lot of taxes," according to a criminal complaint filed recently against a Queens, N.Y., preparer. In another case, a tax preparer said he is going to report only $13,188 as taxable income, instead of the $131,884 the undercover agent had said was the correct amount, says an official at the New York Department of Taxation and Finance. Another preparer, referring to records given to him by the undercover agent, said: "This one and this one, I never saw this. It's going into the shredder." Officials have already begun prosecuting some preparers on criminal charges, and they expect additional criminal prosecutions against other preparers -- as well as some clients, says William Comiskey, the tax department's deputy commissioner, office of tax enforcement. Officials will also be seeking civil fraud penalties against preparers. Mr. Comiskey says some preparers have agreed to cooperate and go undercover to show that their clients knew of the fraud and build evidence against those clients -- and, in some instances, against other preparers. "They are cooperating against their former clients in other ways as well," such as sharing client lists and identifying fraudulent returns, Mr. Comiskey says. He says the state hasn't yet investigated tax-preparation chains, and that most of the preparers "were sole practitioners or were in small group practices." Officials say they found evidence of fraud among about 40% of the 85 professional tax-return preparers they visited. If all the phony returns that were prepared had actually been filed, "it would have cost the federal, state and local governments approximately $4 million" in taxes, says Mr. Comiskey. The sting operation, which began in fall 2007 and is continuing today, is part of New York's greatly increased crackdown on tax cheating. In the seven months through October, New York's tax department opened 1,378 criminal fraud investigations -- more than in any prior year and more than twice as many as the 581 cases opened in all of fiscal 2007. The department referred 329 cases to prosecutors in the past seven months, up from 271 in the entire prior fiscal year and 198 the year before that. The department also has increased the number of staffers devoted to fraud enforcement to about 125, up from 25 in early 2007, and hopes to expand further.