Brother Jerry Love gets 13 years in the slammer for scamming the IRS (updated)

Gerald Poynter told an audience at a Doubletree Hotel in Atlanta that the folks working at the Internal Revenue Service weren’t too terribly bright.

Poynter, known as “Brother Jerry Love” to his adherents, was holding a seminar in the Atlanta hotel in 2008 to tell people that filing bogus tax returns was an easy way to scoop up quick cash. He said IRS agents weren’t attentive enough to pick up on a tax return with the name SpongeBob Squarepants on it; they would issue the refunds anyway. 

Brother Jerry Love also told the crowd that there were ways to avoid detection from IRS investigators, but he acknowledged that imprisonment was a possible outcome of following his advice. 

His musings in Atlanta became a reality in Kansas City; Poynter pleaded guilty Thursday to conspiracy charges tied to his fake tax-return scheme. He admitted that he tried to send in 284 phony tax returns to the IRS with the goal of culling $96 million in ill-gotten tax refunds from the U.S. Treasury.

The plea agreement has Poynter going to jail for 13 years and paying up to a few dollars short of $1 million in restitution to the federal government.

Poynter was charged in 2011 after IRS criminal investigators caught on to his scheme, but not before paying out $3.5 million in bogus tax refunds. Poynter would take a cut from the tax returns on behalf of clients recruited into the scheme. He treated the business as an almost religious venture, having clients pay him fees (which he called love offerings) with checks to the “Jerry Love Ministries,” which he ran out of a Blue Springs karate dojo.

Poynter didn’t have much luck dealing with the authorities. His first attorney, Ron Partee, had to leave the case when he himself was charged by federal prosecutors for his role in a Breaking Bad-style money-laundering scheme.

 So long, Brother Jerry Love.

Update: Semi-related, The Washington Post reported about an hour ago that the IRS issued $4 billion in bogus tax refunds to people filing with stolen identities.