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Your Naughty IRS Employee of the Week

That dubious award goes to longtime IRS employee Wayne Garvin, who might be hanging out in Club Fed for as long as five years after pleading guilty to tax evasion on March 22. Garvin, 57, a resident of Columbia, SC, who most recently worked as a supervisory associate advocate with the IRS’s Taxpayer Advocate Service in Philadelphia, confessed to filing false tax returns and providing fabricated records to the IRS in an attempt to obstruct an audit of those returns.

According to the Justice Department:

For the years 2012 through 2016, Garvin prepared and filed with the IRS individual income tax returns on which he claimed false deductions and expenses associated with rental properties he owned, fictitious real estate taxes on his personal residence and made-up charitable contributions. On his 2013 tax return, Garvin also deducted nearly $16,000 in false expenses associated with his employment with the U.S. Army Reserves. Although Garvin was formerly a member of the U.S. Army Reserves, he did not perform any reservist duty in 2013 and was not entitled to deduct any expenses related to that employment. In total, Garvin admitted to causing a loss to the IRS of more than $74,000.

Court documents also show that after the IRS began an audit of Garvin’s 2013 and 2014 tax returns, Garvin attempted to obstruct the audit by submitting fictitious documents to the IRS. For example, to justify the false deductions and expenses on his tax returns, Garvin created and submitted receipts from a church, invoices from a contractor and a letter from the Department of the Army. After learning he was under criminal investigation, Garvin later submitted some of the same fraudulent documents to IRS-Criminal Investigation.

Garvin is scheduled to be sentenced on July 6. In addition to facing a maximum of five years in prison, he also faces a period of supervised release, restitution, and monetary penalties.