Popular accountant to be jailed Old Town man pleaded guilty to tax charge

BANGOR – A popular Old Town accountant and former tax preparer was sentenced to one month’s imprisonment to be followed by one year of supervised release, including three months of home detention Monday for aiding the preparation of a false federal income tax return.

George Bates, 50, pleaded guilty in July to the charge. He was ordered to report on Nov. 28 to a facility yet to be selected.

The sentencing took place at U.S. District Court in Bangor. Chief Judge D. Brock Hornby of the U.S. District Court in Maine presided.

About 40 people filled a federal courtroom in Bangor in apparent support of Bates. His two stepsons, a sister-in-law and a former supervisor with the Kennebec Valley Community Action Program spoke on his behalf, describing Bates as an intelligent man who served as a role model for many and often thought of others before himself.

Bates expressed regret for his actions.

His attorney, Dan Pileggi of Ellsworth, said his client did not profit personally from the activity.

Judge Hornby, while noting the number of Bates’ supporters and the good he’s done, stated that the accountant also had committed a federal crime.

“The fact these two things occur in the same individual is one of the complexities of human life,” Hornby said. It is the tendency of people to want to classify things as black or white and people as “saints or sinners, but people can do both,” Hornby said.

“I carry a sense of the community that wrong cannot go unpunished,” Hornby said, though he added the likelihood of Bates’ repeating the behavior “is small.”

According to a plea agreement worked out in the case, Bates’ actions netted a client some money but also put the client in arrears with the Internal Revenue Service.

If the case had gone to trial, the government planned to subpoena a witness who would testify that Bates prepared the client’s income tax return and falsely claimed he had a word processor-courier business when in fact the client did not. The client would testify that he had not told Bates he had such a business, and that income and expenses reported on a tax form for the alleged business were “substantially false and fictitious,” states a court document.

The tax return was one of several Bates filed with fictitious information, but he was prosecuted on the one count. According to the plea agreement in Bates’ court file, the misconduct covered a two-year period from 1994 to 1996 and involved at least five other clients and 10 other tax returns. The government claimed the total tax loss caused by Bates amounted to $7,2110.

Bates ran a business called Affordable Accounting in Old Town. He no longer has authority to process tax returns professionally for the IRS, according to Stephen Bellingreri, a spokesman for the IRS criminal division in Boston.

Bellingreri said the IRS was “happy with the conviction. We try to make sure people who prepare tax returns professionally do the right thing and those people not doing the correct thing should know the IRS will prosecute to the fullest extent of the law.”