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Tax Fraud Blotter: Big plans

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What becomes of the broken-hearted; the earth moved; Kreative accounting; and other highlights of recent tax cases.

Providence, Rhode Island: Four Florida residents have been convicted and sentenced for what authorities called one of the largest schemes to defraud CARES Act programs.

The defendants defrauded various federally funded programs of more than $4.8 million, and each of the defendants pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. The schemes involved obtaining and using stolen ID information to submit fraudulent applications to multiple state unemployment agencies, including the Rhode Island Department of Labor and Training, and to submit fraudulent Economic Injury Disaster Loans and Paycheck Protection Program loan applications. The defendants also submitted fraudulent applications in the names of other persons to federal and state agencies to obtain tax refunds, stimulus payments, and disaster relief funds and loans.

The scheme involved using the stolen information to open bank accounts to receive, deposit and transfer fraudulently obtained government benefits and payments and to obtain debit cards to withdraw the money.

Sentenced were Florida residents Tony Mertile, of Miramar, identified in court documents as the leader of the conspiracy, to six years in prison; Junior Mertile, of Pembroke Pines, sentenced to 54 months; Allen Bien-Aime, of Lehigh Acres, to four years; and James Legerme, of Sunrise, to four years. All four were also sentenced to three years of supervised release to follow their prison terms.

The government moved to forfeit a total of $4,857,191, or $1,214,294.75 apiece, proceeds of the conspiracy. The defendants have also forfeited hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of Rolex watches and assorted jewelry and more than $1.1 million in cash. Each defendant is also liable for $4,456,927.36 in restitution to defrauded agencies and financial intuitions.

Raleigh, North Carolina: Michon Griffin, 46, who engaged as a money mule (a.k.a. middleman) in an international romance scheme, has been sentenced to two years in prison and three years of supervised release after pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering and to making false statements on her 1040.

Between 2021 to 2023, Griffin received more than $2 million from the scheme that she deposited into fictitious bank accounts that she controlled. She converted the money to virtual currency and wired the funds to overseas accounts controlled by her co-conspirators in Nigeria.

Griffin received some $300,000 from the romance fraud, which she did not report as income on her 1040 for 2021.

She was also ordered to pay $109,119 in restitution to the IRS.

Las Vegas: Tax preparer Keisy Altagracia Sosa has pleaded guilty to preparing false income tax returns.

Sosa has operated the tax prep business National Tax Service, and from 2016 to 2021 prepared and filed false federal returns for clients. These returns included falsely claimed dependents, and fictitious Schedule A and Schedule C expenses such as sales taxes paid and unreimbursed employee expenses.

Sosa continued to prepare false returns even after the IRS notified her that her returns appeared inaccurate and informed her that she may not be meeting due diligence requirements. 

Sosa caused at least $550,000 in tax loss to the IRS.

Sentencing is June 11. She faces up to three years in prison, as well as a period of supervised release and monetary penalties. 

Hands-in-jail-Blotter

Elk Mound, Wisconsin: Business owner Deena M. Hintz, of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, has been sentenced to a year in prison for failure to pay employment taxes.

Hintz, who pleaded guilty in December, owned and operated Jade Excavation and Trucking for nearly 10 years and at times had up to 15 employees. From 2017 to 2021, Hintz deducted more than $400,000 in federal employment taxes from employees’ pay and, instead of paying those taxes to the government, kept the money.

She was also ordered to pay $482,185.46 in restitution.

Littleton, Colorado: Tax preparer Thuan Bui, 60, has been sentenced to three years in prison and a year of supervised release and ordered to pay a $50,000 fine after pleading guilty to one count of aiding or assisting in preparation of false documents.

From about 2016 to 2021, Bui operated a tax prep business under several names, lying to clients that he was a CPA. On hundreds of returns, Bui overstated or fabricated expenses on Schedules C.

Philadelphia: Resident Joseph LaForte has been sentenced to 15 and a half years in prison for defrauding investors, conspiring to defraud the IRS, filing false tax returns, employment tax fraud, wire fraud, obstruction and other charges.

LaForte defrauded investors using a fraudulent investment vehicle known as Par Funding. Along with conspirators, he caused a loss to investors of more than $288 million.

He and conspirators diverted some $20 million in taxable income from Par Funding to another entity controlled by LaForte and nominally owned by another, then filed returns that did not report this income; he also received more than $9 million in kickbacks from a customer of Par Funding and did not report this income to the IRS. He paid off-the-books, cash wages to some employees, failing to report these wages to the IRS and not paying employment taxes.

The federal tax loss exceeds $8 million. He also caused $1.6 million in state tax loss to the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue by falsely reporting that he and his wife were residents of Florida from 2013 through 2019 when they lived in Pennsylvania.

Hampton Roads, Virginia: Two area residents have pleaded guilty to their roles in a refund scheme involving pandemic relief credits.

Between October 2022 and May 2023, Kendra Michelle Eley of Norfolk, Virginia, filed eight 941s for Kreative Designs by Kendra LLC using the EIN assigned to another company, Kendra Cleans Maid Service. These forms covered four tax periods in 2020 and four in 2021. On each of the forms, Eley falsely reported wages paid and federal tax withholdings for 18 purported employees, knowing there were no such employees.

For the four forms filed for 2021, Eley claimed false sick and family leave credits and Employee Retention Credits, totaling some $975,000. In December 2022, the IRS issued two refund checks payable to the cleaning company totaling $649,050.

That same month, Eley and Rejohn Isaiah Whitehead, of Portsmouth, Virginia, opened a business checking account in the name of Kendra Cleans; signatories on the account were Eley and Whitehead. The two falsely represented the nature and extent of the business, including that it had 16 employees and that the average pay of each was $2,000. Eley funded the account by depositing one of the refund checks in the amount of $389,640. In January 2023, Eley wrote Whitehead two checks from the account totaling $60,000.

Whitehead’s sentencing is June 26 and Eley’s is July 9. They each face up to 10 years in prison.

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Accounting

Tipalti buys Statement to add treasury automation capacities

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Payments platform Tipalti announced it has acquired Statement, an AI-powered treasury automation solution.

Tipalti provides a suite of finance automation solutions for accounts payable, global payouts, procurement, employee expenses, corporate cards, supplier management and tax compliance. With the acquisition of Statement, the platform now adds treasury functions to its capacities.

“I am excited to welcome Statement to the global Tipalti team and to accelerate our treasury capabilities with powerful AI innovation for finance teams around the world,” said Chen Amit, CEO and co-founder of Tipalti. “For many global businesses in today’s economy, getting complete and instant cash flow visibility across bank accounts, systems, entities and currencies is very complex. Together, we have a unique opportunity to evolve our customers’ treasury operations into a key business driver, empowering them to take control of their cash flow and maintain real-time visibility of their business finances. This addition to our finance automation suite furthers our mission to elevate how finance teams operate in the global economy.” 

Statement, which uses machine learning AI, automates and streamlines the manual processes of cash position visibility, cash flow forecasts and cash insights across many types of platforms, such as banks, ERPs, billing tools and databases.

For Tipalti customers, Statement Treasury is available immediately as a standalone solution. In the coming months, Tipalti plans to fully integrate Statement Treasury into its platform. Meanwhile, for Statement customers, nothing changes. They can keep using Statement with no disruption to access or functionality.

In a later email, Amit said that Statement will operate independently as a part of Tipalti while they build a thoughtful integration plan, for now. In the coming months, Tipalti plans to fully integrate Statement Treasury into Tipalti’s platform. 

Amit added that as part of the deal, Tipalti is taking on leadership and staff from Statement to retain access to their expertise.

“The Statement team brings decades of valuable experience to Tipalti. Their product design is AI-native, bringing both a valuable set of product capabilities and a team that has deep AI innovation expertise. They have reimagined legacy treasury operations for modern businesses and brought advanced functionality to mid-market businesses,” he said in the email. 

The deal was signed on June 16, 2025, and is expected to close shortly. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

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Accounting

KPMG launches multi-agent AI platform Workbench

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Big Four firm KPMG announced the launch of its new multi-agent AI platform, Workbench, which will serve as a foundational and single AI platform, designed to underpin its client delivery platforms as well as its other AI platforms such as KPMG Digital Gateway (Tax), KPMG Velocity (Advisory) and KPMG Clara (Audit). The capabilities are available internally to KPMG professionals and are also available to deploy for clients.

“The next phase of AI will be defined by platforms that scale,” said Steve Chase, US vice chair of AI and digital innovation. “Workbench is KPMG’s single, global AI platform—built on an interoperable architecture that supports agent-to-agent coordination and multi-model flexibility. It’s the foundation for how we’re scaling AI across our business and for our clients —with confidence, agility, and global impact.” 

The platform sports a network of 50 AI assistants, or agents, that interact with each other across multiple sectors with nearly a thousand more currently in development. They’re meant to work as “digital teammates” alongside KPMG professionals. Working on Microsoft Azure infrastructure, Workbench is conceived of as a “one stop shop” platform that will serve up tools and agents to KPMG professionals within the systems they work in every day. Most will never directly interact with the platform itself, as the assistants will be retrieving solutions for them. To do so it uses interoperable, agent to agent communications to bring together capabilities from across the KPMG ecosystem of alliance partners (e.g. Oracle, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday) to best address the task at hand. 

KPMG Workbench enables team members to automate complex, multi-step processes from client onboarding to regulatory reporting. Beyond internal use, private instances of KPMG Workbench will also be available to clients from across industries to help develop and manage their own digital workforce. KPMG said that clients can maintain full control of how their data is stored and processed and manage diverse risk and governance needs, helping them to meet local and global regulatory requirements. KPMG is also certified in ISO 42001, which concerns AI Management Systems.

While the precise definition can vary depending on who is asked, very broadly agentic AI could be described as software that is capable of at least some degree of autonomy to make decisions and interact with tools outside itself in order to achieve some sort of goal—whether booking a flight, sending a bill or buying a gift—without constant human guidance. Agents are not necessarily new, but the rise of generative AI has made them much easier to make and use, as doing so no longer requires specialized coding skills. Since they exploded onto the scene, the need for platforms that can coordinate between agents has become clear. 

The news comes about a month after Deloitte announced its Global Agentic Network, a connected ecosystem of AI agents for business purposes to augment and automate client operations. This, in turn, came a few months after PwC announced its AgentOS platform, which connects AI agents with each other, regardless of platform or framework, into modular adaptive workflows integrated with enterprise systems. Finally, this came just a few days after EY touted the launch of its own EY.ai Agentic Platform

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Beyond the algorithm: Why human judgment defines the future of accounting

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I first discovered accounting in my sophomore year of college and was immediately drawn to its zero-sum game: every trial balance must foot to zero, every debit matched by a credit; it was a perfect harmony of logic. But as I moved from the classroom to the conference room, I realized that behind each journal entry lies a human story far richer than any spreadsheet.

At EY, I spent years in the international tax practice, working on mergers and acquisitions, IP onshoring and cross‑border reorganizations, an environment where the answer almost always began with “it depends.” Every multistep plan we proposed carried consequences across jurisdictions, and our task was to bring every stakeholder along, weighing trade‑offs in tax savings, implementation costs and regulatory scrutiny. Gaining that buy‑in requires something more than technical expertise; it demands trust, built through empathy and open dialogue. And while we may lean on AI tools for speed and analysis, the trust we place in another person is fundamentally different and irreplaceable.

It is certain that AI will truly upend our way of working. When I started out in my career and had to understand what GILTI, BEAT and FDII meant and why I should care about them, I had a few paths to take: 1. Go ask my senior or manager and have them explain it to me; 2. Look it up on Google and get well and truly lost reading through the regs; or 3. Go read a BNA portfolio. Now with even the most basic AI large language model, I can ask for it to define the subject, give me an example and break it down for me as if I am a child.

The access you have today to information is comparable to when the internet first became available and with this brings the debate: ‘Will we need accountants in the future?” I understand why this question keeps getting brought up. Most people outside think we have a standardized workflow with pristine data for which we just log in at 9 and go home at 5 after working on our beloved spreadsheets. But ask anyone in the industry and they will tell you how they would love to have this kind of a lifestyle where each answer was clear and there was a definitive way forward. 

As AI technology evolves, so too will the tools that have shaped our careers. Every day, new startups launch with the promise of revolutionizing how we work. Before long, I believe all the manual tasks we once performed will be fully automated. I look forward to the day when I can simply extract a trial balance from the system and generate a tax return that automatically applies book‑to‑tax adjustments, tracks every business change from the year, and delivers a complete, compliant filing. I’ll shed tears of joy the first time I never have to hand‑fill a Schedule Q again.

But that’s when my real work will begin. I will review each return not only to confirm that the numbers are entered correctly, but also to ensure they make sense in context. I’ll seek to understand the story the business is telling: Why did certain figures move? What does this reveal about the company’s strategy? And based on those insights, how can we design a proactive plan for the coming year? To answer these questions, I’ll draw on every lesson from my critical thinking courses and ask why.

AI shouldn’t be viewed as a career threat but as a powerful partner in our work. After all, our clients’ finances are deeply personal, tied to their dreams, anxieties and life milestones, and emotions inevitably come into play. With regulations and tax laws shifting daily, clients will look to us not just for compliance, but for someone who can translate figures into a meaningful narrative. You personally know how many questions you got asked over the last few months asking you to predict what is going to happen this year. That’s where human judgment is irreplaceable: knowing when to dig deeper, which details to emphasize, and how to guide clients through complexity with clarity and compassion.

In the age of AI, the professionals who will excel are those who invest as much in empathy, communication and critical thinking as they do in technical skills. They’ll build workflows that require every AI‑generated insight to pass through a human lens and welcome the moments when financials reveal a story of resilience or ambition. AI will continue to accelerate change, but behind every algorithmic recommendation and every line on a tax return, there must be a person ready to listen, interpret and guide. Because at its core, finance will always be personal.

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