Rolling Meadows tax professional gets 10-year federal prison sentence in fraud case

A 43-year-old Rolling Meadows man was sentenced to more than 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to multiple fraud charges and bilking clients out of roughly $2.5 million.

Prosecutors said Adam R. Oliva was sentenced in December in one case and received another 4.5-year sentence Wednesday after pleading guilty in a second case. The sentences will be served consecutively.

In the first case, Oliva acted as a tax professional from 2015 to 2020 and induced clients to pay him money to pay off tax debt. Instead, prosecutors said Oliva kept the money for himself and doctored client tax returns to “make it less likely that the IRS would contact the clients about their unpaid tax liabilities.”

In the second case, Oliva duped investors into providing short-term loans to clients and promised those investors 10% to 20% returns. Instead, he pocketed the investors’ money and used it for personal expenses, including gambling, restaurant meals and retail purchases.