CONCORD, N.H. - United States Attorney Emily Gray Rice announced that Gladys Maria Pena Dominguez pleaded guilty in federal court to participating in an illegal 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. Pena pleaded guilty to one count each of the federal crimes of Theft of Government Property, Aggravated Identity Theft, and Conspiracy. Pena, 34 years old, is a resident of the Bronx, N.Y., and a former resident of Nashua, N.H.
According to statements made during the hearing, from January 2012 to December 2013, Pena couriered at least 130 U.S. Treasury tax refund checks from New York, N.Y., to 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 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 government alleged that the aggregate face value of the checks exceeds $1.1 million.
United States District Judge Landya McCafferty took Pena’s guilty plea and scheduled her sentencing for March 16, 2017. Pena is subject to a statutory maximum sentence of seventeen years in prison, fines of up to $750,000 or both.
This matter was investigated by the Internal Revenue Service’s Criminal Investigation unit, principally by its Manchester, N.H., field office, with assistance from its field office in New York, N.Y. The case is being prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Bill Morse.
Source: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the United States Attorneys
