Charlotte tax preparer cheated public out of millions. Then she burned the evidence.

In late June 2019, Tina Wells made an urgent phone call from the Mecklenburg County jail to plot her response to the federal investigation that had led to her arrest and was now enveloping her tax-filing company.

Wells, according to court documents, had been indicted and jailed a few days before. Now she wanted to make sure incriminating records disappeared from her offices at Rush Tax Services before government agents got them first, according to court documents filed by her prosecutors.

“We’ve got to get the stuff out before they put the locks on. It’s no secret no more ... This s--- is real,” someone said on the recorded call, which included Wells, her daughter and others, according to court filings in the case.

“We have files in there, clients we’ve done. We’ve got to get a U-Haul and move all of that stuff out of the place at one time. A very large U-Haul.”

Eventually, according to federal prosecutors, the group came up with another solution — one they’d used before: When investigators twice demanded documents, Andrivia Frances “Tina” Wells or her associates burned them.

On June 30, 2019, a fire broke out in a northwest Charlotte residence that Wells owned, destroying company files and the tax returns of clients that already had been subpoenaed by a federal grand jury. A witness who formerly lived in the house told investigators that the fire had been set by Wells’s daughter, who was identified in court records as Ashley Harris, and one of Harris’ friends who had worked for Wells, documents claim.

Harris, according to court documents and Mecklenburg jail records, has not been charged in connection with the case.

A similar fire in 2017 at the company’s main office on Beatties Ford Road destroyed other files. Prosecutors say it occurred the very day Wells was to hand over records to the Internal Revenue Service, which had launched a probe into Wells’ business practices.

According to the Charlotte Fire Department, the blazes were intentionally set. Prosecutors charged Wells, 53, with “setting or causing” both.

Now the heat has been turned up around her. Next month, U.S. District Judge Robert Conrad will sentence Wells as the convicted mastermind of a sweeping tax fraud conspiracy that was as audacious in its scope as it was in Wells’ efforts to hide it.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Charlotte says Wells exploited thousands of unwitting customers by falsifying their returns without their knowledge and collecting exorbitant fees from their refunds. Prosecutors say her long-running scheme also cheated the public out of millions of dollars in taxes. In addition to the torching of records, prosecutors say Wells also lied under oath to the grand jury to obstruct the investigation.

In a 150-page filing last week, Wells’ prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney Caryn Finley, said the defendant’s criminal activity spanned six income-tax seasons, involved up to 6,000 fraudulent tax returns, and stole some $3.4 million from the U.S. Treasury — an amount the government wants Wells to repay in court-ordered restitution.

Finley recommends a “significant term of imprisonment,” of between 70 and 87 months. Any prison term would be the second for Wells, who served eight years of a 151-month federal sentence after being convicted of drug trafficking conspiracy in Charlotte in 1999.

In a hand-written letter to Conrad in February, Wells shared extensive details from her background, apologized “for being a part of the federal judicial system” and challenged some of the allegations lodged against her.

“I have never taken from clients,” she wrote, adding, “Yes I broke the law.”

Charlotte attorney James Exum, part of Wells’ defense team, said his client’s letter came “straight from her heart.”

“It’s important that the judge knows her as more than just a file number,” Exum said in a Wednesday email to the Observer. “Her admission of guilt came from her guilty plea, but by no means does she agree with or accept all of the positions that the government made in its sentencing memorandum.

“She is a good person who made errors in judgment. We look forward to addressing this in court.”

Preying on her clients

Wells also filed doctored returns for herself and her family. She failed to report $1.2 million in client fees she’d collected over a four-year period, court documents allege. She also claimed extensive and fraudulent deductions, including an education credit for herself when she was not enrolled in school, and also for her son while he was in prison, Finley wrote.

Wells has been held in the Mecklenburg County Jail since her arrest. How much longer she spends behind bars is up to the judge, who had been scheduled to announce Wells’ punishment on Monday.

However, Conrad delayed the sentencing hearing after learning that Exum had begun a two-week self-quarantine after being exposed to a family member who tested positive for COVID-19, court documents show. On Tuesday, the sentencing was moved to Oct. 25.

According to filings in the case, a little more than 16% of U.S. taxpayers inaccurately report their income, leaving an annual tax gap of up to $441 billion. Three-quarters of that amount is tied to noncompliance by individual taxpayers.

In their filings, prosecutor accuse Wells of victimizing the government, legitimate taxpayers and especially her clients, who neither knew about the fraud nor the exorbitant fees Wells charged and withdrew directly from their refunds. When the fraudulent returns were challenged, Wells left her customers to face the IRS on their own, Finley writes.

Wells was originally charged with an array of tax crimes along with destruction of records and obstruction of an investigation. In a deal with prosecutors, she pleaded guilty shortly before the start of her trial in February 2020 to a reduced set of charges.

Nonetheless, prosecutors are not asking Conrad for leniency. In her memo, Finley says Wells has shown no remorse for her actions.

“She preyed on an uneducated clientele,” according to Finley’s filing. “Many of defendant’s clients did not know how to prepare a tax return and trusted her to prepare their returns accurately. Defendant violated this trust.

“This case presents a powerful opportunity for this Court to deter similar tax frauds.”