This Keys man spent years fudging tax returns. He cost the IRS millions, the feds say.

A Florida Keys tax preparer faces up to six years in federal prison after admitting he filed fraudulent tax returns with the Internal Revenue Service.

Pedro C. Rodriguez, 52, pleaded guilty Jan. 17 at U.S. District Court in Key West to two counts of a 20-count indictment that charged him with filing the bogus returns between 2007 and 2017.

Judge K. Michael Moore will sentence Rodriguez in Key West at 9 a.m. April 1 in Key West.

Each charge of aiding and assisting the preparation of false tax returns carries a maximum of three years, so Rodriguez faced up to 60 years in prison if he went to trial and was found guilty.

Rodriguez owned and operated JC Mar Tax Services in Marathon. For a decade he filed returns for his clients seeking refunds they weren’t entitled to and by reporting fictionalized itemized deductions and fraudulent education and residential energy credits.

“Rodriguez’s submission of false tax returns caused multimillion dollar losses to the IRS,” said Sarah Schall, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office, in a statement Tuesday. “A final calculation of the loss amount will be made at sentencing.”

Between 2013 and 2017, Rodriguez filed each year between 1,900 and 2,200 tax returns on behalf of clients.

Rodriguez charged $80 to $120 to prepare individual tax returns, and filed returns both electronically and in paper form.

But he typically filed to the IRS electronically and often gave clients copies of tax returns that didn’t show the false credits that he was placing on their returns so they wouldn’t notice the fraud.

In one case, Rodriguez filed a 2016 tax return on behalf of clients who paid him $85 in cash and had gone to him for several years.

Rodriguez claimed on their return that they had spent more than $6,000 to install solar water heating although they hadn’t nor did they tell him they did.

Rodriguez also falsely wrote they had paid more than $9,000 in mortgage interest and spent some $13,000 on job expenses, and that they were entitled to receive a residential energy credit in the amount of $1,920 and itemized deductions in the amount of $31,293.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel J. Marcet is prosecuting the case.

This story was originally published January 29, 2019 at 2:25 PM.

Gwen Filosa

Miami Herald

Gwen Filosa covers Key West and the Lower Florida Keys for FLKeysNews.com and the Miami Herald and lives in Key West. She was part of the staff at the New Orleans Times-Picayune that in 2005 won two Pulitzer Prizes for coverage of Hurricane Katrina. She graduated from Indiana University.