On Wednesday, a federal judge sentenced a Tampa woman to 5 \u00bd years in jail for tax fraud and identity theft. She must also repay $119,000 to the federal government.<\/p>\n
According to court documents, Ms. Belinda Smith Brooks,<\/strong> 47, entered a guilty plea in May to federal income tax fraud and aggravated identity theft. U. S. District Judge Mary S. Scriven sentenced Ms. Brooks<\/strong> to 42 months in federal prison for the theft of government. Following the completion of that sentence, Ms. Brooks<\/strong> must spend 24 months in federal prison for aggravated identity theft. Additionally, she must complete three years of supervision after her release from prison.<\/p>\n The monetary amount she is ordered to repay the federal government is $118,882.63. She had initially filed claims valued at $223,544. The IRS paid more than half of the claims filed before the fraud was detected, court documents said.<\/p>\n Ms. Brooks<\/strong> entered a guilty plea of filing several fraudulent income tax refunds in 2008 and 2009 in the names of several people. The victims were unaware that Ms. Brooks<\/strong> had filed taxes on their behalf, court records show.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On Wednesday, a federal judge sentenced a Tampa woman to 5 \u00bd years in jail for tax fraud and identity theft. She must also repay $119,000 to the federal government. According to court documents, Ms. Belinda Smith Brooks, 47, entered a guilty plea in May to federal income tax fraud and aggravated identity theft. U. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":210,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/210"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18612"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18612\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}