Miami woman found not guilty of stealing tax refunds before she became a cop
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A year ago, Ebony Nesbitt — a Miami-Dade police officer, Navy veteran and mother of two — had her life on track.
Then it got derailed when the feds charged her with pocketing illicit income-tax refunds through a massive scam at Miami Dade College.
On Tuesday, Nesbitt, 29, got her life back when a federal jury in Miami acquitted her of stealing more than $7,500 from the Internal Revenue Service and conspiring to defraud the government. She was facing years in prison if convicted.
Her defense attorney, Frank Prieto, said the 12-person jury saw that she was a victim of her boyfriend’s scheme to use Nesbitt’s bank account when she was a Miami Dade student as a conduit for receiving fraudulent tax refunds.
“She only allowed [the boyfriend] to use her account,” Prieto said after the jury’s verdict following a week-long trial. “She didn’t know the funds were fraudulently obtained.”
Prieto said his hope is that Nesbitt, who was suspended without pay from the Miami-Dade Police Department last year, will be reinstated on the force. “She is trying to get her job back,” he said.
Nesbitt’s former boyfriend, Andrew Morales, pleaded guilty to theft of government funds and was given a five-year probationary sentence in January. He was ordered to pay back $7,568 in ill-gotten tax refunds.
Nesbitt allowed the ex-boyfriend to use her bank account that she had set up to make tuition and other payments at Miami Dade College, according to court records and trial evidence.
Back in 2013, federal authorities say that Nesbitt and numerous other students attending the college joined a ring that stole people’s identities to file phony income tax returns seeking nearly $2 million in refunds. Some of the students, such as Nesbitt, received thousands of dollars in their college bank accounts.
Nesbitt was not among the 18 Miami Dade College students who were arrested in 2014 as federal prosecutors froze more than 1,000 student bank accounts used to deposit fraudulently obtained tax refunds. The ring filed returns in the names of 650 taxpayers whose Social Security numbers were stolen. As a result, the IRS issued almost $500,000 in refunds.
Nesbitt, of North Miami, was arrested four years after the initial roundup in the college scandal. She was accused of receiving $7,573 from the IRS that was directly deposited into her college-linked bank account.
The case against her was made by the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s Office as the statute of limitations was going to expire.
This story was originally published April 10, 2019 at 2:56 PM.
