Florida tax-shop chain sentenced for training staff to fabricate client deductions
Jonathan Carrillo and Franklin Carter Jr. ran Neighborhood Advance Tax, a chain of roughly a dozen Florida tax-prep offices, from 2016 to 2020, then reopened in the same storefronts as Taxmates from 2021 — training employees and, later, franchise owners to fabricate client deductions and inflate refunds. A former manager, Diandre T. Mentor, ran a related operation, Smart Tax & Finance, using the same methods. All three pleaded guilty and were sentenced in August 2025: Carrillo to 121 months, Carter to 84 months, and Mentor to 36 months, with combined restitution exceeding $27.8 million. Two co-conspirators, Emmanuel Almonor and Adon Hemley, were sentenced to 57 and 46 months.
- Year
- 2025
- Where
- United States
- Outcome
- Sentenced
- Reported loss
- $27.8 million
- Victims
- Not stated in the sources
- Schemes
- Fraudulent tax preparers
- Last reviewed
- 2026-09-11
The facts, as recorded
- Carter and Carrillo owned and operated Neighborhood Advance Tax (NAT), which ran roughly a dozen storefront offices across Florida from 2016 to 2020.
- Diandre T. Mentor worked as a preparer for NAT and managed its Orlando location from 2018 to 2019, before starting a similar operation, Smart Tax & Finance, in 2020.
- Carter, Carrillo and their co-conspirators fraudulently inflated client tax refunds by fabricating deductions on their returns, and held periodic training sessions teaching other NAT employees how to prepare the false returns.
- In 2021 Carter and Carrillo opened Taxmates in some of the same strip-mall storefronts NAT had previously occupied, continuing the same false-deduction methods and training franchise owners and employees in them.
- Carter and Carrillo pleaded guilty days before a scheduled jury trial; Carter also pleaded guilty to failing to file his own income tax returns, and Carrillo to aiding in the preparation of false tax returns. Mentor, Almonor and a further co-conspirator, Abryle de la Cruz, pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the United States as part of the scheme.
- On 28 August 2025, U.S. District Judge Wendy W. Berger sentenced Jonathan Carrillo to 121 months in prison with restitution of approximately $12,170,066; Franklin Carter Jr. to 84 months with restitution of approximately $12,543,946; and Diandre T. Mentor to 36 months with restitution of approximately $3,090,077 — each with three years of supervised release to follow.
- Co-conspirators Emmanuel Almonor and Adon Hemley were sentenced to 57 and 46 months respectively.
Why this case matters
This is the franchise-scale version of the scheme: not one dishonest preparer, but a business model — storefronts, employee training sessions, and eventually franchise owners — built specifically to fabricate deductions at volume, and rebuilt under a new name after the first company was shut down.
Reopening under a new name
When Neighborhood Advance Tax’s run ended in 2020, Carrillo and Carter did not stop. They opened Taxmates the following year in some of the very storefronts NAT had used, continuing the same fabricated-deduction method — a reminder that closing one shell of a business does not by itself end the underlying fraud.
Training it like a business, because it was one
The training sessions are the detail that separates this from an individual preparer padding numbers on his own. Carter, Carrillo and their co-conspirators taught the method to employees, and later to franchise owners, turning one person’s fraud into a repeatable operating procedure across a dozen offices.
The caveat
This is a concluded case. Carrillo, Carter and Mentor all pleaded guilty and were sentenced by a federal judge; the facts above are drawn from the IRS’s own published accounts of the pleas and sentencing, not unproven allegations.
Sources
- Florida men sentenced to prison for scheme to prepare false tax returns for clients. US Internal Revenue Service, Criminal Investigation. Accessed 2026-09-11. Supports: The defendant names, sentences, restitution figures, sentencing date, judge's name, and the Neighborhood Advance Tax, Smart Tax & Finance and Taxmates business names and their years of operation.
- Two Florida men plead guilty to crimes related to a scheme to prepare false tax returns for clients. US Internal Revenue Service, Criminal Investigation. Accessed 2026-09-11. Supports: The guilty pleas entered days before trial, the specific charges each defendant pleaded to, the training-session detail, and the co-conspirators' names.