Acting United States Attorney John J. Farley announced today that Gladys Maria Pena Dominguez, 35, was sentenced on Monday to serve 54 months in federal prison for her role in a scheme to use stolen personal identifying information to file false federal income tax returns and steal hundreds of thousands of dollars from the U.S. Treasury.
According to statements made during the proceedings, from January 2012 to December 2013, Pena couriered approximately 161 U.S. Treasury tax refund checks from New York, NY, to Kenneth Feliz, a co-conspirator in New Hampshire, who gave Pena cash in return. As Pena knew, the checks had been obtained from the Internal Revenue Service by co-conspirators who induced the IRS to issue the checks based upon false tax returns that the co-conspirators had filed using the names and Social Security numbers of real people without their consent or knowledge. The co-conspirators also reported false mailing addresses on the tax returns to cause the IRS to mail the fraudulently derived Treasury tax refund checks to locations that they controlled. The aggregate face value of the checks was approximately $1.1 million.
Pena is a resident of Bronx, NY, and a former resident of Nashua, NH, Pena had previously pleaded guilty to the federal crimes of theft of government property, aggravated identity theft, and conspiracy.
After completing her prison sentence, Pena will serve three years of supervised release. She also must pay $1,095,879.44 in restitution to the IRS.
Feliz is scheduled to be sentenced on July 10, 2017.
This matter was investigated by the Internal Revenue Service’s Criminal Investigation unit, principally by its Manchester, NH, field office, with assistance from its field office in New York, NY and its Fraud Detection Unit. Assistant United States Attorney Bill Morse prosecuted the case.
