OMG Chase Employees Admit to $4.8 million tax fraud

Chase employees admit to $4.8 million tax fraud

Former bank workers used customers’ identities to file fraudulent tax returns

By Ashley Post

August 14, 2012 • 

Three former JPMorgan Chase & Co. employees will soon pay the price for trying to get away with identity theft.
Yesterday, three women—Katherine Torres, 52; Rosalind Smith, 41; and Judith Fulgencio, 32—who worked at two separate New York Chase branches pleaded guilty to using the identities of some of the bank’s Puerto Rican customers to file fraudulent tax returns. Manhattan federal prosecutors charged all three women in January with orchestrating two tax fraud schemes between 2006 and 2007. Their schemes amounted to $4.8 million in losses for the Internal Revenue Service and the state.
The women face up to five years in prison.
Read Thomson Reuters for more about the tax fraud.
Meanwhile, other banks continue to be embroiled in various legal scuffles. Just last week, news broke that a proposed $7.2 billion settlement between a class of retailers and Visa Inc., MasterCard Inc. and more than a dozen major U.S. banks—including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc.—would continue to move forward. The plaintiffs claim the credit card companies and banks conspired to fix credit and debit card use fees. If approved, the deal would be the largest antitrust settlement in U.S. history.