Man gets eight years for ripping off IRS while behind bars

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

A former Homewood man who taught fellow jail inmates how to use stolen identification to file bogus tax returns and steal from the U.S. treasury was sentenced Friday to eight years in federal prison.

U.S. District Judge Mark Hornak imposed that term on Reginald Harris, 51, and ordered him to pay $246,170 in restitution to the IRS.

The judge described Harris as the leader of a ring of criminals pulling various versions of the scheme, which have become increasingly common across the U.S.

Federal agents call the crime “SIRF,” for stolen identification refund fraud, and the U.S. attorney’s office here has prosecuted many perpetrators in the past few years.

Harris was unusually brazen in that he even held classes at the state prison in Cresson, Pa., for fellow inmates in which he taught them how to file fake returns and get refunds to which they were not entitled. He later kept filing bogus returns while in federal custody.

Harris had several scams. But his most common one was to file returns and claim false income of less than $1,800 so that an employer, who did not really exist, didn’t have to file a W-2 form.

Prosecutors said he then claimed that the bogus taxpayer had a dependent and would include a Social Security number and a name.

Filing such returns entitles a taxpayer to an earned income tax credit paid by the IRS.

To help him, Harris recruited people on the outside to give him Social Security numbers and addresses. To get the refund checks cashed, he and Anthony Nalls, another inmate, used Nalls’ uncle, Dennis Naylor, to forge the name of payees and deposit checks at accounts he had at Citizens Bank.

All of the parties pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court.

Harris initially defrauded the IRS while in state prison from 2009 to 2012, prosecutors said.

After his release, he was first charged in federal court in 2014 with drug dealing and then indicted a few months later for the tax fraud.

While serving his sentence in the drug case and awaiting sentencing in the tax case, he continued to pull his tax scheme while in custody at a federal detention center in Ohio, where he arranged for the filing of false returns of other inmates there.

In handing down his sentence, Judge Hornak noted Harris’ ringleader role and also described his history as a “buffet of criminal conduct” that includes fraud, theft, selling drugs and threatening people.