Accounting
Tax Fraud Blotter: Incorrect positions
On ice; the end of the beginning; Speed trap; and other highlights of recent tax cases.
Miami: A federal court has issued a permanent injunction against tax preparer Richard Louis that bars him from preparing federal income tax returns, working for or having any ownership stake in a tax prep business, assisting others (including family members) prepare returns or setting up business as a preparer and transferring or assigning customer lists to any other person or entity.
In June, the court enjoined seven independent contractors who worked with Louis — Harold Bornelous, Romeo Davis, Teddy Davis, Joseph Garrett, Demetrius Knowles, Daniel Oku and Marlyne Wah — from preparing returns for others but allowed them to apply for reinstatement after two years if they successfully complete the IRS Annual Filing Season Program. The contractors agreed to the injunctions.
The complaint alleged that Louis and the seven contractors prepared returns that claimed various false or fabricated deductions and credits, including fabricated residential energy credits, false and exaggerated itemized deductions, and fictitious and inflated business expenses. According to the complaint, Louis marketed himself as Taxman and he with the seven contractors prepared thousands of returns for clients over the past 10 years.
The court also ordered Louis to disgorge $390,000 from the scam that he’d received from his prep business. He agreed to both the injunction and the disgorgement.
Moon Township, Pennsylvania: Business owner Albert Boyd Jr. has pleaded guilty to willfully filing a false return.
For each year from 2017 to 2022, Boyd failed to report income from his company, Boyd Roll-Off Services, on the business return, causing a total tax loss of at least $1,030,000.
Boyd ensured that much of the company’s income from the sale of scrap metal went unreported by causing cash proceeds not to be deposited in the business bank account and causing checks to be deposited into accounts other than the business bank account. Boyd then failed to provide his tax preparer with records relating to the undeposited cash and diverted checks.
Sentencing is Dec. 17. He faces up to three years in prison and a fine.
Des Moines, Iowa: Businessman Mark Francis Davidson, 66, formerly of Adel, Iowa, has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for filing a false income tax return.
Davidson is the majority shareholder of Collegiate Concepts Inc., which rents dorm minifridges to colleges and college students. From 2015 to 2021, Davidson diverted more than $3.8 million from the corporation to himself and failed to report this income to the IRS. Davidson concealed these payments from the corporation’s accountant and tax preparer by providing check ledgers that falsely identified checks from the corporation to Davidson as legitimate business expenses.
After his imprisonment, Davidson will be on supervised release for a year. He was also ordered to pay $1,449,620 in restitution to the IRS and a fine of $20,000.
Frankfort, Illinois: Jeremiah Johnson, owner of three local childcare and transportation businesses, has been sentenced to a year and a day in prison for underreporting more than $1.47 million in income.
Johnson owned New Beginnings Academy, New Beginnings Child Development and Epic Transportation. From 2015 to 2020, he obtained more than $1.47 million of income from the operation of those businesses but failed to report the money on his individual returns, instead reporting lesser W-2 wages and some rental income.
During the same period, Johnson also failed to file corporate returns or pay any of the required employer and employee withholdings for federal income tax, Social Security tax and Medicare.
Johnson, who pleaded guilty earlier this year, was also fined $10,000 and ordered to pay $123,391 in restitution to the IRS.
Wilmington, North Carolina: Businessman George William Taylor Jr. has pleaded guilty to not paying more than $2 million in employment taxes and not filing employment tax returns.
Taylor owned and operated National Speed, a service business for high-speed automobiles. He was responsible for withholding Social Security, Medicare and income taxes from employees’ wages and paying those taxes to the IRS. From 2014 through 2021, Taylor withheld the taxes but did not pay those withholdings over to the IRS, nor did he file the necessary employment returns. During the same period, he also did not pay the employer’s share of those taxes to the IRS.
In total, Taylor caused a federal tax loss of $2,272,072.
Sentencing is Nov. 19. Taylor faces up to five years in prison, as well as a period of supervised release, restitution and monetary penalties.
Cincinnati: A U.S. district court has issued a permanent injunction against tax preparer Emmanuel Antwi and his businesses.
Antwi and his businesses, Manny Travel Agency & Business Services Inc. and Manny Financial, Insurance & Accounting Firm LLC, consented to the injunction, which permanently bars them from preparing federal returns for others. The United States’ claim demanding that Antwi turn over ill-gotten gains he received in tax prep fees remains pending.
According to the civil complaint, since at least 2020 Antwi filed hundreds of returns each filing season with at least 95% of the returns claiming a refund. Allegedly, Antwi knowingly took unreasonable or incorrect positions on returns he prepared that resulted in understatements of the tax that his clients owed and overstatements of refunds.
In particular, the complaint alleges that Antwi prepared returns that claimed deductions for purported business losses or employee business expenses that he knew were false. The complaint also alleges that Antwi prepared returns where he knowingly reported the wrong filing status.
Antwi must send notice of the injunction to each person for whom he or his businesses prepared federal returns, amended returns or claims for refund after Jan. 1, 2019. He must also post a copy of the injunction both on websites that he and his businesses maintain and at physical locations where any business is conducted.
Newnan, Georgia: Business owner Barry Lee White, of Carrollton, Georgia, has been sentenced to 22 months in prison to be followed by three years of supervised release for willful failure to pay more than $2.4 million in payroll taxes.
Between 2012 and 2019, White owned and operated, at different times, two construction maintenance and electrical companies that were required to withhold from employees’ gross pay FICA taxes and as sole operator of the companies, White had the responsibility to collect, truthfully account for, and pay the IRS the payroll taxes.
From at least 2015 to 2018, White withheld more than $1.8 million in payroll taxes from his employees but failed to pay the taxes to the IRS and failed to pay more than $600,000 for the employer’s portion of the payroll taxes.
Convicted of the charges in May after pleading guilty, White was also ordered to pay $2,499,473.07 in restitution.
Big Four firm PwC announced new agentic AI capacities, including a model that proactively identifies areas of value leakage and acts inside the tools teams already use to fix them itself.
The new solution,
The software, which is supported by PwC’s recently released
The system connects directly into ERP environments, continuously monitors key metrics, and acts inside the tools teams already use. For example, a supply chain agent might detect rising shipping costs and automatically reroute deliveries to reduce spend. Finance agents can spot and correct billing errors before they reach the customer. Clients typically see measurable efficiency gains in the first quarter, with continued improvements over time as the system learns and adapts.
“Too many transformations still rely on one-off pilots and stale data, stretching the gap from insight to impact and suffocating ROI,” said Saurabh Sarbaliya, PwC’s principal for enterprise strategy and value. “Agent Powered Performance flips the economics by distilling PwC’s industry transformation playbooks into AI agents that turn static insights into compounding gains, without rebooting each time.”
Agent Powered Performance is platform-agnostic and built on an open architecture so it can work across different LLMs based on client preferences and task-specific needs. It works with major enterprise platforms including Oracle, SAP, Workday and Guidewire.
Agent OS Model Context Protocol
PwC also
By integrating this standard, agent systems registered as MCP servers can be used by any authorized AI agent. This reduces redundant integration work and the overhead of writing custom logic for each new use case. By standardizing how agents invoke tools and handle responses, MCP also simplifies the interface between agents and enterprise systems, which will serve to reduce development time, lower testing complexity, and cut deployment risk. Finally, any interaction between an agent and an MCP server is authenticated, authorized and logged, and access policies are enforced at the protocol level, which means that compliance and control are native to the system—not layered on after the fact.
This means that agents are no longer siloed. Instead, they can operate as part of a coordinated, governed system that can grow as needs evolve, as MCP support provides the interface to external tools and systems. This enables organizations to move beyond isolated pilots toward integrated systems where agents don’t just reason, but act inside real business workflows. It marks a shift from experimentation to adoption, from isolated tools to scalable, governed intelligence.
Research Composer
Finally, a PwC spokesperson said the firm has also launched a new internal tool for its professionals called Research Composer, a patent-pending AI research agent embedded in the firm’s ChatPwC suite, designed to accelerate insight generation by combining web data with PwC-uploaded content.
Professionals will use the Research Composer to produce in-depth, citation-backed reports for either the firm or its clients. The solution is intended to enhance the quality of client work by equipping teams with research and strategic analysis capabilities.
The AI agent prompts users through a step-by-step research workflow, allowing them to shape how reports are packaged—tailoring the output to meet strategic needs. For example, a manager in advisory services might use Research Composer to evaluate white space opportunities across industries or geographies, drawing from internal reports and up-to-date market data.
Eide Bailly, a Top 25 Firm based in Fargo, North Dakota, is growing its presence in the Pacific Northwest by adding Traner Smith, based in Edmonds, Washington, effective June 2, 2025.
Traner Smith’s team includes two partners and 16 staff members and specializes in tax compliance and advisory services. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Eide Bailly ranked No. 19 on
Eide Bailly already has offices in Seattle, but hopes to grow further in the Pacific Northwest. “We’re pleased to welcome the talented team at Traner Smith to Eide Bailly,” said Eide Bailly managing partner and CEO Jeremy Hauk in a statement Monday. “Their expertise with high-net-worth individuals, real estate and privately held businesses aligns well with our strengths, and their client-centric approach is a perfect cultural fit. Having an office in Edmonds, Washington, is a great complement to our existing presence in Seattle. Together, we’re poised to deliver even greater value to families and businesses in the Seattle metro area.”
“Joining Eide Bailly is a natural next step for us — it provides access to deeper technical resources in areas like state and local tax, national tax, succession planning and international tax while allowing us to continue the personalized service our clients value,” said Kevin Smith, a partner at Traner Smith, in a statement.
“With this expanded support and platform, we’re excited to grow our reach, elevate what we do best, and help more clients than ever before,” said Shane Summer, another partner at Traner Smith, in a statement.
Eide Bailly has announced several other mergers in recent weeks. Earlier this month, it added
In 2023, Eide Bailly added
Top 100 firm
“We began working with Knuula in Spring 2024 to streamline our engagement letter process,” said Don Murphy, Managing Member of BMSS. “It quickly became clear that Knuula was not only a strong solution for us, but also an ideal partner in advancing industry-wide automation.”
While the specific terms of the deal were not disclosed, a spokesperson with Knuula said that, after this investment, BMSS and a collection of 21 of their partners now own 13% of the company. The investment represents not some passive revenue deal but an active collaboration between the two companies, with the spokesperson saying they will be working closely together on things like product development, new features, improvements, and networking.
The deal comes about a year after Knuula integrated with QuickFee, a receivables management platform for professional service providers, which allowed users to have engagement letters directly connecting to their QuickFee billing platform, tying the execution of the letter directly to the billing process.
“We’ve long sought to partner with a firm focused on strategic innovation in the accounting space,” said Jamie Peebles, founder of Knuula. “To develop a perfect solution for large firms, it is ideal to have a partner that is willing to work closely together and iterate quickly. This requires constant feedback between our two teams. The IT team from BMSS worked with our development team constantly and helped us iterate rapidly. We also had consistent input from partners, manager, and administrative staff to help us make valuable changes to Knuula. BMSS was a perfect partner for us.”
PwC AI agent acts proactively to preserve value
Eide Bailly merges in Traner Smith
BMSS announces investment, collaboration with Knuula
New 2023 K-1 instructions stir the CAMT pot for partnerships and corporations
The Essential Practice of Bank and Credit Card Statement Reconciliation
Are American progressives making themselves sad?
-
Accounting1 week agoEssential Strategies for Maintaining Data Security in Modern Bookkeeping
-
Finance1 week agoAmerica failing its young investors, warns financial guru Ric Edelman
-
Economics7 days agoCPI inflation April 2025: Rate hits 2.3%
-
Finance1 week agoPowell may have a hard time avoiding Trump’s ‘Too Late’ label even as Fed chief does the right thing
-
Economics1 week agoTariff receipts topped $16 billion in April, a record that helped cut the budget deficit
-
Economics1 week agoChecks and Balance newsletter: The election of Pope Leo XIV goes beyond American politics
-
Personal Finance5 days agoHouse Republicans advance Trump’s tax bill. ‘SALT’ deduction in limbo
-
Economics5 days agoViolent crime is falling rapidly across America