United States Court of Appeals For the Eighth Circuit ___________________________ No. 19-1123 ___________________________ United States of America lllllllllllllllllllllPlaintiff - Appellee v. Jacques Eviglo, doing business as Global Income Tax Services lllllllllllllllllllllDefendant - Appellant ____________ Appeal from United States District Court for the District of South Dakota - Sioux Falls ____________ Submitted: February 13, 2020 Filed: May 5, 2020 [Unpublished] ____________ Before LOKEN, BENTON, and KELLY, Circuit Judges. ____________ PER CURIAM. A jury convicted Jacques Eviglo of twenty-five counts of making false claims against the United States in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 287 and five counts of wire fraud in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1343. The district court1 sentenced Eviglo to 108 months imprisonment, the bottom of his advisory guidelines sentencing range. Eviglo appeals, arguing the evidence was insufficient to convict him of knowingly making false claims and acting with the intent to defraud, and the sentence is substantively unreasonable. Reviewing sufficiency of the evidence de novo, but deferring to the verdict unless no reasonable jury could find Eviglo guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and reviewing the substantive reasonableness of his sentence for abuse of discretion, we affirm. I. Sufficiency of the Evidence. College-educated Eviglo was born in 1981, came to this country in 1998, and prepared and electronically filed over two thousand federal income tax returns in tax years 2012-2016, doing business as Global Income Tax Services in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. His client base was primarily non-English-speaking immigrants working at facilities such as meat packing plants in Sioux Falls and western Minnesota. He used Drake Software to prepare and file clients’ returns. The Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) notified Drake if a return was accepted or rejected. A tax preparer using Drake, which is designed for professionals, is presumed to know what data is required. Eviglo also used a “bank product” in which the IRS transmitted refunds into a depositary bank account, and the tax preparer collected fees from that account. The IRS began investigating Eviglo in 2016 after several taxpayers complained they did not receive full refunds from Global Tax and portions of their returns were inaccurate. At trial, the jury heard two days of testimony from Eviglo’s taxpayer clients whose returns formed the basis of the charged offenses. Nearly all spoke no English and had little tax law knowledge or experience. They met with Eviglo at 1 The Honorable Karen E. Schreier, United States District Judge for the District of South Dakota. -2- Global Tax, where he asked only for their W-2 form, Social Security number, and immigration documents or a driver’s license. When Eviglo finished the return on his computer, he handed the client, without explanation, papers to sign which included a Bank Product Information form listing the fees to be collected. Before leaving, the client received the tax return in a sealed envelope with a Post-It note stating the expected refund. The client paid $50 to $150 cash. Eviglo entered a “bank product” account number on the tax return and extracted substantial additional fees ...
Original document
Source: All recent Immigration Decisions In All the U.S. Courts of Appeals