Court bars Ramesh Sarva from the scheme.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: Ramesh Sarva, a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) in New York, has been barred from actively promoting a nationwide tax scheme he allegedly was pitching to clients of his.
A US federal court said on Tuesday that Sarva could no longer try and sign clients up for the apparently illegal scheme, the details of which sound almost too good to be true. Sarva, who resides in Little Neck, New York, has agreed to the injunction levied against him by Judge Josephine L. Station, of the US District Court for the Central District of California.
According to the Department of Justice, Sarva sold his customers a life insurance welfare benefits plan that allowed them to unlawfully claim significant tax deductions that they were unqualified for. On top of that, these people would have access to the entire value of the contributions they made towards their life insurance policy, by taking out loans against it.
“Sarva’s promotion of these unlawful welfare benefit plans deprived the U.S. Treasury of significant amounts of tax and subjected his customers to audits and IRS scrutiny,” said the Department of Justice, in a press release.
The injunction against Sarva bars him from promoting and selling any kind of welfare benefit plans. Additionally, Sarva will have to furnish the US government with a list of all of his customers, regardless of if they were part of this life insurance tax scheme, and Sarva will have to send a copy of the injunction to all of his customers, so that they are aware of his pending investigation.
Sarva has been a CPA for over 36 years, according to his LinkedIn page, and owns an office in Forest Hills, New York.
The Justice Department also said that Sarva was nabbed by its Tax Division, which has “obtained more than 500 injunctions to stop tax fraud promoters and tax return preparers” over the last ten years.