The
article I found this week was from Accounting Today. This article is about a real estate agent in
Southern California who was promoting a tax fraud scheme. She was convicted on Wednesday of filing
false claims against the U.S. She would
submit false 1099-OID for clients. This
would result in a larger tax return. She
would charge each client $1,000 and then take a percentage of the return too. The fake returns that she filed totaled to
$1,331,576 in refunds. After there was
investigation she also went and told her clients to lie about the entire
situation to the grand jury. She is now being
charged for this too. In the end this
whole scheme could result in up to 15 years in prison for her.
This is
heavily connected to accounting because one of the main purposes of accountants
is to do taxes for either individuals or for businesses. There are many opportunities for accountants
to be deceiving, and it is a question of ethics. We learn a lot about ethical decision making
during accounting courses. This is a
situation where someone did not make an ethical decision and now she could face
prison time for it. Accounting is one
industry where the people who are involved need to be honest. Even though some of the results of your job
may not make people very happy like having to pay a large sum into the
government, but we still have to do that.
That is something that we sign-up for when we choose this career
path. Some people forget that after
working in the field for a while and it could result like this situation. Accountants really have to think and analyze
information and their decisions before committing to them.
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