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Samuel Gentle, who operated GenGen, Inc., and GenGen Financial, Inc. in Mount Vernon, prepared about 3,200 tax returns each year from 2010-2014, routinely inflating deductions for business expenses and gifts to charity, said U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara in a statement released after the sentencing.
Bharara said the IRS sent an undercover agent into Gentle’s office as part of its investigation and that the agent provided the tax preparer with “no records that he could have used to support any deductions.”
While preparing the undercover agent’s tax return, however, Gentle included numerous deductions and charitable gifts, Bharara said, adding that he used similar practices while preparing tax returns for “numerous clients” who testified that they, too, had provided the tax preparer with no documentation to support false or inflated deductions.
Additionally, Gentle failed to report his own personal and business tax returns on nearly half of the $1 million in receipts he received for his services over the four-year period, Bharara said, adding that he instead spread the receipts across eight bank accounts at five banks.
Bharara said Gentle further hid his behavior from the IRS by failing to issue required IRS forms to himself and his employees. His illegal business practices cost the IRS at least $550,000, Bharara said.
“As established at trial, Samuel Gentle abused his position as a tax preparer to file false tax returns on behalf of his clients, himself, and his businesses,” Bharara said. “His fraud resulted in over half a million dollars in losses to the IRS, and now a sentence of 51 months in prison....”
Gentle’s sentencing in Federal Court in White Plains came after he was found guilty of the charges during a one-week trial in July, according to Bharara, who said that in addition to the 51-month sentence, the 59-year-old was ordered to serve one year of supervised release and ordered to pay a $125,000 fine and $295,000 in back taxes.
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