BOSTON — A Swampscott man was sentenced to 30 months in prison for his role in a scheme that falsely inflated the federal income refunds of taxpayers and diverted some of the refunds to accounts he and his co-conspirators controlled, the US Attorney’s office for Massachusetts said.
Boris Shadari, 46, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States, three counts of filing a false tax return, three counts of aiding or assisting in filing a false tax return, two counts of theft of government funds, five counts of aggravated identity theft and one count of witness tampering for his role in the scheme.
“Shadari not only defrauded the federal government, but also took advantage of people in his own community, many of whom were hardworking immigrants who were not familiar with American tax laws,” US Attorney Rachael Rollins said in a statement. “Today’s sentence provides justice for members of the Congolese community in Greater Boston that Mr. Shadari targeted and exploited.”
Shadari was sentenced on Tuesday.
From 2012 to 2018, Shadari and co-conspirator Christian Zynga, held Shadari out as a tax professional, targeting Boston’s Congolese community, Rollins said in a statement. Until 2017, Shadari and Zynga took their customers’ tax information to a tax professional, where they would provide false information about the customers’ dependents, dependent and childcare expenses, and business income and losses in an effort to inflate the tax refund their customers would receive.
Shadari and Zynga would then ensure the funds were split between accounts they controlled and accounts controlled by their customers.
After 2017, Shadari began preparing customers’ returns himself, continuing to artificially inflate the refund due to the customer by filing false information on the report.
Shadari also neglected to report the income he earned from the scheme on his own tax return.
Once he became aware of the investigation, Shadari told a taxpayer to lie to investigators about the information in the returns he had prepared for her and suggested she would owe thousands of dollars back to the IRS and that her immigration status in the United States could be compromised if she did not.
“In a scheme that was difficult to detect, Boris Shadari took advantage of dozens of hard-working members of his own community, betrayed their trust, and defrauded taxpayers in the process, all the while raking in almost half a million dollars for himself,” said Special Agent in Charge of the FBI Boston Division Joseph R. Bonavolonta.
