Date: November 3, 2023 Contact: newsroom@ci.irs.gov Alexandria, VA — An Alexandria man was sentenced today to 18 months in prison for defrauding the U.S. government of approximately $1.4 million in tax revenue by preparing false tax returns on behalf of his unsuspecting clients. According to court documents, between 2016 and 2020, Lawrence Appiah-Osei ran a tax preparation business called New Look Enterprise out of his home in Alexandria. From at least 2017 through 2020, Appiah-Osei executed a scheme to fraudulently inflate the tax refunds of his clients. To do so, Appiah-Osei falsely claimed that his clients operated businesses that lost thousands of dollars each year. These fraudulent losses drove down the clients' taxable income and increased the clients' tax refunds. The Internal Revenue Service-Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) estimates the Appiah-Osei's actions resulted in a tax loss of approximately $1.4 million to the federal government. Jessica D. Aber, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, and Kareem A. Carter, IRS Criminal Investigation (CI) Acting Special Agent in Charge of the Washington D.C. Field Office, made the announcement after sentencing by Senior U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis, III. Assistant U.S. Attorney Christopher Hood prosecuted the case. 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. 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.
