Following a guilty plea in March in which he admitted to filing fake tax returns and giving forged data to the IRS in an effort to thwart an audit of those returns, a former IRS employee was sentenced to 13 months in prison today.
Wayne M. Garvin, 57, a current resident of Columbia, South Carolina, was a long-time IRS worker who most recently served as a Supervisory Associate Advocate with the IRS’s Taxpayer Advocate Service in Philadelphia, according to court filings.
Garvin created and filed with the IRS personal income tax returns claiming false deductions and costs linked with rental properties, bogus real estate taxes on his own dwelling, and manufactured charitable contributions from 2012 to 2016.
Furthermore, Garvin deducted nearly $16,000 in fictitious expenses related to his work with the United States Army Reserves on his 2013 tax return. Garvin was a past member of the United States Army Reserves, but he did not do any reservist duty in 2013 and hence was not eligible to deduct any costs linked to that occupation. Garvin caused the IRS a total loss of more than $74,000.
Court records also reveal that Garvin attempted to obstruct the IRS’s audit of his 2013 and 2014 tax returns after it had started by sending false documents to the agency. For instance, Garvin manufactured and provided to the IRS auditors receipts from a church, invoices from a contractor, and a letter from the Department of the Army to support the bogus deductions and costs on his tax returns.
Garvin then submitted some of the same fraudulent documents to IRS-Criminal Investigation after discovering he was under criminal investigation.
Garvin was also had to pay $74,662 in restitution to the IRS and complete three years of supervised release in addition to his prison sentence.
The statement was made by Acting Deputy Assistant Attorney General Stuart M. Goldberg of the Justice Department’s Tax Division and U.S. Attorney Jacqueline C. Romero for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
The case was investigated by the IRS-Criminal Investigation.
The case was prosecuted by Trial Attorney Melissa S. Siskind of the Justice Department’s Tax Division and Assistant U.S. Attorney Tiwana Wright of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.