Former Richland deputy sentenced for tax fraud

A former Richland County deputy was sentenced Monday to a year and a day in prison for her role in multiple fraud schemes.

Maribel Crespo, 40, pleaded guilty in February to one count of preparing false state income returns, and agreed to testify against other former deputies. She originally had been charged with 11 counts of preparing a false tax return and faced a maximum of 55 years in prison.

Crespo’s activities included trafficking in counterfeit goods, impersonating a federal agent and tax fraud, according to a news release from the United States Attorney’s Office.

According to information presented during her guilty plea, Crespo sold counterfeit luxury goods including fake Michael Kors handbags and Rolex watches over the internet.

Crespo also posed as an officer of the Department of Homeland Security to defraud undocumented immigrants by charging them thousands of dollars for counterfeit immigration paperwork, the news release said.

Officials said Crespo helped five other deputies falsify their returns, attaching children’s information to the returns so that she could claim them as false dependents in an effort to artificially inflate the amount of the tax returns. Sheriff Leon Lott announced the scam and fired the officers in October 2014.

The children used were typically citizen children of non-citizen Hispanic residents in the Columbia area, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Crespo would forward a part the tax return to the parents of the dependent, some to herself and the remainder to the tax filer. Based on IRS calculations, Crespo cheated the government of more than $100,000 with the fraudulent returns.

This story was originally published May 23, 2016 at 1:13 PM with the headline "Former Richland deputy sentenced for tax fraud."