Tax probe targets illegal workers

Amalia Cerrillo has made her living helping other people pay their taxes.

Sometimes she showed them how to get on the tax rolls in the first place, helping clients without Social Security numbers apply for a special ID they needed to file their returns.

Some were illegal immigrants who got jobs using fake or stolen information, but that wasn’t an issue for the Internal Revenue Service: Legal or not, everyone must pay their taxes.

Nor was it an issue for Cerrillo: “I’m not here to judge them. If they need to file taxes, then I help them file taxes.” But Weld County authorities saw it differently.

Last month, they served a warrant to search thousands of records at Amalia’s Translation and Tax Services, looking for illegal immigrants who have used Americans’ Social Security numbers to file their own taxes.

“Obviously, the federal government isn’t doing their job, and it’s falling to local agencies to do it,” Weld County Sheriff John Cooke said.

The search is the latest sign of escalating tension as local authorities seek to combat illegal immigration, traditionally a federal concern.

Weld County Dist. Atty. Ken Buck said prosecutors from throughout the Southwest have inquired about the effort.

Some people in this northern Colorado city say the operation is a witch hunt that has sent panic through a community still raw from immigration raids at a meatpacking plant two years ago.

“They are working hard and trying to comply with tax laws,” Kim Baker Medina, a Fort Collins immigration attorney, said of workers. “This is an excuse to try to round up immigrants.”

Operation Number Games began as a single case in August, when Weld County sheriff’s detectives arrested a local man, Servando Trejo. Trejo admitted he had begun using a fake Social Security number years earlier when he slipped across the border and had used it ever since, according to a search warrant.

He told detectives he obtained a tax identification number and filed federal tax returns with the help of Cerrillo after confiding in her that he was using a fake Social Security number.

“Everyone knows to go to her for their taxes,” he said, according to a search warrant.

Individual tax identification numbers were created by the Internal Revenue Service in 1996 for taxpayers who don’t qualify for a Social Security number but have a tax liability. Many illegal immigrants use these tax ID numbers to file their tax returns, attaching W-2 forms with the false Social Security numbers they used to get a job.

IRS officials declined to comment but provided a statement noting that federal law requires all people with U.S. income to pay taxes.

In Greeley, Cerrillo catered to a Latino clientele -- many of whom need taxpayer identification numbers to file their taxes. She said her clients didn’t volunteer information about their immigration status, and she didn’t ask.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” she said. “I just follow the IRS rules.”

An investigator for the Colorado Department of Revenue who reviewed the case at the request of Weld officials agreed, saying Cerrillo had not violated any laws. But Weld officials said their examination of her files suggested that some of her clients had.

Of 5,000 returns they examined, they found 1,300 that had both taxpayer identification numbers and Social Security numbers, raising suspicions that the Social Security numbers were falsified or stolen.

Stolen numbers can cause a variety of problems for their rightful owners, such as damaging their credit or drawing the attention of IRS auditors.

So far, authorities have arrested 28 people. Those believed to have used stolen numbers are charged with identity theft, while those suspected of creating fictitious numbers are charged with criminal impersonation. Officials said they don’t yet know how many of the 1,300 names will fall into each category because verifying Social Security numbers is a slow process.

Weld officials say the average return they analyzed showed a worker paying $800 in taxes, claiming many exemptions and a child tax credit, and receiving a refund of more than $2,000.

Cooke and Buck suggest the refunds are inappropriate. They acknowledge they have no jurisdiction over such issues but said they wanted to emphasize the costs to government. “As a taxpayer, I have the right to know what this scam is costing -- a scam perpetrated by the IRS and tax preparers,” Cooke said.

That premise is false, Baker Medina said. “The IRS determined if they were entitled to a refund,” she said. “They worked for that money.”

Many of Cerrillo’s clients are afraid that they could be arrested, said Vickie Lara of Latinos Unidos, a community group. She said some have left their jobs and moved out of the city. Lara said she doesn’t condone theft, but the case should have stopped with the arrest of the original suspect.

“If the IRS was OK with it, why are Ken Buck and the sheriff taking it to such an extreme?” Lara asked.

In the cinder-block building where she’s worked for 10 years, Cerrillo said she doesn’t know whether she wants to continue in the tax business.

“I haven’t had anybody stop by since all this started,” she said. Boxes of tax returns were piled about, in need of refiling since the sheriff returned them. “I have to put them back in the filing cabinet,” she said, “but I don’t have the strength to do it.”