WASHINGTON – A federal court has permanently barred a Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.,-area woman and her company from preparing federal income tax returns for others, the Justice Department announced today. According to the government complaint in the case, Carole Exantus of Plantation, Fla., operated a company called J’s Corporation in Miami. The court found that J’s Corporation repeatedly prepared federal income tax returns claiming false tax credits and deductions that it knew would result in understating customers’ tax liabilities. Exantus agreed to the permanent injunction order without admitting wrongdoing.

The complaint alleged that Exantus and her employees frequently included in customers’ tax returns false claims for the fuel tax credit, which is available only for off-highway business use of fuels. The complaint further alleged that the returns Exantus and her employees prepared often claimed that her customers had bought more fuel than their incomes, as reported in the same returns, could have paid for.

Fuel credit scams are on this year’s IRS list of the Dirty Dozen Tax Scams. In the past few years the Justice Department has obtained injunctions shutting down many tax preparers who claimed the phony credits on customers’ returns.

John DiCicco, Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department’s Tax Division, thanked Brian H. Corcoran, the Justice Department trial attorney who handled the case, and Shauna Henline, a technical advisor with the IRS’s Small Business/Self-Employed Division, who conducted the investigation.

In the past decade, the Justice Department’s Tax Division has obtained injunctions against more than 410 tax-return preparers and tax-fraud promoters. Information about these cases is available on the Justice Department Web site.