Opinion ID: 3168445
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Angulo’s Fraudulent Tax Filings

Text: The district court did not clearly err in considering Angulo’s fraudulent personal tax filings as relevant conduct for sentencing purposes. There was a clear pattern to all of Angulo’s tax violations, and they easily could be viewed as part of a related series of transactions. See U.S.S.G. § 2T1.1 cmt. n.2. Angulo used the same “OID method” in preparing her own fraudulent returns that she used when preparing, or assisting in preparing, the returns of her clients with Zuloaga. In both 13 Case: 15-10998 Date Filed: 01/11/2016 Page: 14 of 17 cases, Angulo’s intended victim was the IRS, and her purpose was to falsely claim tax refunds based on fraudulent information. Moreover, Angulo filed her own fraudulent returns during the same time frame in which she and Zuloaga were preparing their clients’ fraudulent returns. When the IRS began to investigate, Angulo reacted similarly by attempting to skirt IRS agents’ queries by submitting packets of documentation marked with phrases such as “accepted for value exempt from levy.” Although Angulo’s personal tax fraud was charged in a separate (ultimately dismissed) count, it shared several common factors, including the same victim, purpose, and modus operandi, as well as close temporal proximity. In short, as the district court stressed, Angulo’s extrinsic conduct differed from her conspiracy conduct only in that Angulo was preparing returns for herself instead of a third party. The undisputed facts do not show that Angulo’s personal tax fraud was “clearly unrelated” to her tax fraud on behalf of her clients. Because Angulo’s own fraudulent tax returns can fairly be said to be part of the “same course of conduct or a common scheme or plan,” the intended losses of $3,005,045 from her personal returns were properly included in the total tax loss amount used to determine her base offense level.