Light On Dark Water

That's the description, by her lawyer, of a woman in a nearby town who runs a tax preparation and loan business and is pleading guilty to "a systematic scheme" to cheat the government by filing "thousands of bogus tax returns over several years."

According to her plea agreement, she and some of her employees cheated the federal government out of hundreds of thousands of dollars by employing a variety of schemes to illegally pump up refunds.

In some cases, she bought Social Security numbers and other information about children who she listed as dependents on tax returns of people who were not related to them. By doing so, she increased refunds based on the child tax credit and, in some cases the Earned Income Tax Credit designed to help the working poor. She also listed phony businesses to get deductions.

In some cases, authorities said, the tax filers conspired with Mobley and split the extra money with her. In other cases, Mobley acted without the taxpayers’ knowledge and kept all of the extra money for herself.

In some cases, authorities said, she even filed returns on behalf of people who did not even know about the returns. Prosecutors said some of those filers were past customers and some were not. Some did not file a return on their own because they did not make enough money to require it. Some filed a separate return through another tax service without realizing that Mobley also had filed returns in their names.

In one example listed in Mobley’s written plea agreement, she filed a tax return in the name of a woman identified in the plea document only as V.C. without that person’s knowledge.

Bordenkircher said Mobley sometimes used information from past clients and sometimes bought information from third parties. Since the Earned Income Tax Credit caps benefits at 3 children, families with more children sometimes would sell information about the additional kids to be used as dependents on other taxpayers’ forms.

But her lawyer says this doesn't provide an accurate picture of her client:

“Ms. Mobley is an honest and good person. It can be clouded by the charges she’s facing,” she said. “We want to reserve our comments for sentencing, when the community will come out and support her because she’s supported the community.”

You can read the whole story here. I do wonder about her support of the community, since the loan businesses are those payday loan outfits which probably deserve the name "usury" if anything does.

I would simply note all this with amusement as the rhetoric of a defense attorney, except that it's a familiar note. I can't remember any specific cases off the top of my head, but it does seem to be an assertion that pops up frequently when people are involved in some colorful crime or scandal. I think it comes from, or is said of, women more frequently than men: "She's a good person." "I'm a good person." The emphasis is often on that word. 

I hold, as both a philosophical principle and a fact of experience, that there is good in everybody.  But I don't think that's what's meant in these cases. It's the therapeutic mentality, in which sin and guilt don't really exist: one may make "bad decisions" or "bad choices," but these facts do not stain the essentially immaculate heart.