A Fort Lauderdale man was sentenced Tuesday to three years in prison for submitting hundreds of fraudulent tax returns, totaling more than half a million dollars.
Jean Volvick Moise, 39, worked as a tax return preparer from about 2014 through 2022 and had been submitting fraudulent returns for his clients since at least 2016 so that the clients would receive larger returns than they were actually owed, according to a factual proffer, the facts of the case agreed on by prosecutors and the defense. Moise then would charge his clients a larger-than-normal fee.
Moise in the documents he prepared would include false information about clients’ dependents and educational credits, false Form 1099 withholdings, and false Schedule C business expenses, “often for businesses which did not exist,” the factual proffer said.
Moise claimed a dependent as a exemption in 2018 for a client who did not have any dependents and never told the tax preparer that he did, according to the factual proffer. He had also claimed false education credit from a school that the client said he did not recognize, in addition to submitting other false information with the return.
The client had only given Moise his Form W-2, and Moise did not review the return with the client or give the client a copy, the factual proffer said. Moise had prepared the client’s returns since 2016, and he routinely gave Moise between $1,500 and $2,000. The client is identified in the court record only by the initials F.B.
Moise prepared a fraudulent return while federal authorities were investigating undercover, and he admitted that he “makes things up” in order to get more money in return, the factual proffer said.
Moise’s three-year sentence will run consecutive to a separate sentence for a state charge in Broward County, federal court records show.
He was arrested in Broward County in 2016 on a sexual battery charge after he forced himself on a 16-year-old girl, according to an arrest affidavit in that case. He was convicted by a jury of unlawful sexual activity with a minor and sentenced in March 2023 to six years in state prison.
Moise was held in a state prison up until Thursday, when he was booked into the Broward Sheriff’s Office’s Paul Rein Detention Facility in Pompano Beach on a court order, jail records and Florida Department of Corrections records show. Moise remains in the Paul Rein Detention Facility as of Tuesday night.