A Suwanee woman who improperly received a nearly $350,000 federal tax refund and then moved money from bank to bank to avoid paying it back will spend three years in prison, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.
Rose Roye, 64, who appeared before a federal judge in Atlanta for her sentencing, also has been ordered to repay most of the money, prosecutors said.
U.S. Attorney Sally Quillian Yates said Roye “hid the money and sent a blizzard of abusive, false and fictitious documents” to the Internal Revenue Service to throw the agency off.
“She’ll pay a substantial price for her actions — both financially and in her prison term,” Yates said in a statement.
Roye, who was convicted by a jury in June, also tried to repay the tax debt with worthless bonds, prosecutors said.
Soon after she received a $347,000 refund, she began moving money around in a series of bank transactions to avoid paying it back, according to prosecutors and information presented at her six-day trial. The day after she deposited the IRS check, she withdrew $300,000 to put funds in other accounts she had previously opened.
The day after an IRS agent appeared at her door to demand the money in May 2009, Roye withdrew $170,000 from two of the accounts she controlled.
“Roye also sent numerous documents to the IRS, including worthless and fictitious bonds, in an effort to trick the IRS into forgiving her debt, and harassing correspondence to the IRS Revenue Officer assigned to her case,” the U.S. attorney’s office in Atlanta said in a statement.
At one point, the woman filed an IRS form stating that the unidentified IRS officer owed her nearly $513,000. Another time, she filed papers in Gwinnett County Superior Court, saying an IRS special agent owed her $3 million.
In addition to three years in prison, Roye will have to repay $277,671.
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