Date: Oct. 8, 2024 Contact: newsroom@ci.irs.gov NEW ORLEANS — United States Attorney Duane A. Evans announced that Celina Bolton-Fultz of Slidell, Louisiana, pled guilty on Oct. 3, 2024 to thirty counts of assisting in filing false tax returns under 26 U.S.C. § 7206(2), five counts of filing her own false tax returns under 26 U.S.C. § 7206(1), four counts of making false statements under 18 U.S.C. § 1001, and two counts of theft of government funds under 18 U.S.C. § 641. The Honorable Eldon E. Fallon set sentencing for Jan. 23, 2025. According to court documents, from 2018 through 2022, Bolton-Fultz submitted thirty false tax returns for seven clients of her tax preparation business, fraudulently inflating their income by adding fake “household help” income to their returns to obtain inflated tax credits that the clients would not have received had they been truthful. Bolton-Fultz also fraudulently reduced her own income on her tax returns for tax years 2017 through 2021, by fraudulently reducing her gross receipts and reporting false expenses for businesses that she owned. In addition to the tax crimes, Bolton-Fultz pled guilty to two types of fraud concerning funds disbursed under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (“CARES Act”). She pled guilty to four counts of making false statements, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1001, for submitting fraudulent applications in 2020 and 2021 for Paycheck Protection Program (“PPP”) loans, in which she provided false information about her businesses’ payroll and submitted fake tax forms to support those PPP applications. Bolton-Fultz also pled guilty to two counts of theft of government funds, under 18 U.S.C. § 641, for making fraudulent applications for Economic Injury Disaster Loan (“EIDL”) applications, through the submission of false applications to the Small Business Administration (“SBA”) for EIDL funds. To accomplish this fraud, she inflated her businesses’ revenues and expenses and submitted false tax documents in support of the EIDL applications. In total, she received $204,103 in funds through the fraudulent PPP and EIDL applications. Under the terms of her plea agreement, Bolton-Fultz agreed to pay a total of at least $405,133.00 in restitution to the IRS and the SBA. At sentencing, the maximum penalty Bolton-Fultz may receive is three years of imprisonment as to each of the tax counts, five years of imprisonment as to each of the PPP fraud counts, and ten years of imprisonment as to each of the EIDL fraud counts. She also faces a fine of up to $100,000 for each of the tax counts and up to $250,000 for each of the PPP and EIDL fraud counts, or the greater of twice the gross gain to the defendant or twice the gross loss to any person under 18 U.S.C. § 3571, or both. Following any term of imprisonment, Bolton-Fultz also faces a term of supervised release of up to three years for the PPP and EIDL fraud counts and up to one year for the tax counts. Finally, she faces payment of a mandatory special assessment fee for every count to which she pled guilty. On May 17, 2021, the Attorney General established the COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement Task Force to marshal the resources of the Department of Justice in partnership with agencies across government to enhance efforts to combat and prevent pandemic-related fraud. The Task Force bolsters efforts to investigate and prosecute the most culpable domestic and international criminal actors and assists agencies tasked with administering relief programs to prevent fraud by, among other methods, augmenting and incorporating existing coordination mechanisms, identifying resources and techniques to uncover fraudulent actors and their schemes, and sharing and harnessing information and insights gained from prior enforcement efforts. The U.S. Attorney’s Office would also like to acknowledge the assistance of IRS Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) with this matter. Assistant United States Attorney Nicholas D. Moses, of the Financial Crimes Unit and Health Care Fraud Coordinator, is in charge of the prosecution. IRS-CI is the criminal investigative arm of the IRS, responsible for conducting financial crime investigations, including tax fraud, narcotics trafficking, money-laundering, public corruption, healthcare fraud, identity theft and more. IRS-CI special agents are the only federal law enforcement agents with investigative jurisdiction over violations of the Internal Revenue Code, obtaining a more than a 90 percent federal conviction rate. The agency has 20 field offices located across the U.S. and 12 attaché posts abroad.
