By Angie DiMichele
South Florida Sun-Sentinel
(TNS)
A Broward County tax preparer has pleaded guilty to his involvement in a scheme where he submitted hundreds of fraudulent COVID-19 loan applications during the pandemic, amounting to more than $4 million.
Roody Metelus, 47, owned the tax preparation business JRS Tax Services LLC, doing business as Liberty Tax Service, based in Dania Beach. In early 2021, Metelus began recruiting customers and others to apply for federal Paycheck Protection Program loans, known as PPP loans, according to a factual proffer, the facts agreed on by the defense and prosecution.
He prepared loan applications and supporting documents to falsely list applicants as sole proprietors of business, despite the fact that many people were not business owners, the court document said. He then submitted the applications to a bank in another state.
The government’s rules for PPP loans capped annual income that could be reported for an applicant or sole business owner at $100,000, meaning a PPP loan for a sole proprietor would be no more than about $20,000.
All of the fraudulent loan applications Metelus submitted contained false IRS tax documents from 2019 and 2020, including documents that listed net incomes of the businesses ranging between $95,000 and $99,000 “in order to maximize the loan amount,” the factual proffer said.
From January to March 2021, Metelus submitted more than 200 fraudulent PPP applications to the out-of-state bank, with the requests amounting to $4.1 million. The bank funded more than 100 of them, totaling about $2.3 million.
Many of the loan applications Metelus prepared were for customers he previously had prepared tax returns for, the court document said. Others were not previous customers of Metelus but were people who had been “referred” to him for a PPP loan.
While one customer was at Metelus’s office having his taxes prepared, Metelus “offered him a PPP loan and said that it would not need to be paid back,” the court document said. Metelus then prepared the application and submitted it on the customer’s behalf.
The customer would have testified that he did not give Metelus the false information that was included in the application but that Metelus presented him with those documents, which he signed “because he wanted the loan money,” the factual proffer said. Metelus charged the customer $1,500 for the application, which he paid in cash.
In another instance, Metelus prepared a fraudulent loan application for a man who had been referred to Metelus by a friend “as someone who could get him money,” according to the factual proffer. The supporting documents for the application listed the man as a personal trainer whose business’s net income was $95,000. The man received a loan of about $20,000, but he was not a personal trainer and did not own any business.
The man paid some of his loan proceeds to Metelus and to the friend who referred him to Metelus, the court document said.
Metelus entered a plea agreement in April, pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and a federal judge accepted the plea this week. A sentencing hearing is scheduled for July, court records show.
He faces a maximum sentence of five years in federal prison and owes $2.3 million in restitution to the U.S. Small Business Administration.
Photo credit: Photo credit: sergeitokmakov/Pixabay
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