And the nominees are...; junk mail; discredited; and other highlights of recent tax cases.
Libertyville, Illinois: Businessman Anthony D. Panico, 68, has pleaded guilty to evading more than $2.4 million in income taxes.
Panico owned AP Capital Management and operated, controlled or was associated with several other business entities. From 2010 to 2017, he received more than $9.2 million in income.
He admitted that he failed to file federal or state income tax returns for each of those years, resulting in a total federal and state tax loss of some $2,462,934.
Panico admitted that he attempted to conceal his income by the creation and use of multiple entities, the use of nominees, misidentifying the use of funds he obtained from banks, paying personal expenses from corporate entities he controlled and using various trust and nominee entities to acquire real estate and other assets. Several of the entities used by Panico also failed to file returns.
He faces up to five years in prison. Sentencing is Aug. 31.
Las Vegas: Tax preparer Anita Edoria Santa Ana has been sentenced to a year and a day in prison for preparing fraudulent returns over seven years and causing nearly $3 million in federal tax loss.
Santa Ana, who
She was also sentenced to a year of supervised release.
Great Falls, Montana: Construction company owner Trennis Baer has been sentenced to 15 months in prison for employment tax fraud.
Beginning in 2010 and continuing through 2018, Baer, owner of Baer Construction, did not file quarterly employment tax returns, nor did he pay federal employment taxes withheld from his employees’ wages. He failed to comply with these legal requirements even though the company’s outside accountant from at least 2013 on prepared employment returns to be filed and calculated the taxes due. Baer also failed to file personal income tax returns for 2001 to 2006, 2008 and 2010 to 2018.
The federal tax loss exceeded $1.5 million.
Baer was also ordered to serve two years of supervised release and pay some $935,251 in restitution to the U.S.
Addison, Texas: Staffing exec Chelsea Jolynn Tucker, 45, has been sentenced to 14 months and 23 days in prison for tax evasion.
From about 1997 to 2016, Tucker was employed by a staffing and contract services company. She had various financial responsibilities, including administering payroll, preparing W-2s, making employment tax deposits, paying business expenses and monitoring the company’s tax obligations using QuickBooks and TaxGuard.
Between about 2012 and 2017, Tucker stole funds from the company by paying herself as both an employee and a vendor, issuing herself unauthorized bonuses and fraudulent expense reimbursements, using a corporate credit card for personal purchases and using company funds to pay personal credit cards.
Tucker also attempted to evade her income tax obligations by preparing false W-2s that underreported income to the IRS. She also failed to pay the company’s employment taxes. The amount still owed to the IRS totals some $779,664.
Tucker, who pleaded guilty in November, was also ordered to pay $779,664 in restitution.
St. Charles, Missouri: A jury has found marketing company owner Ramsey Windsor, 39, guilty on two counts of assisting in the preparation of false returns.
Windsor owned a company that produced mass mailers for customers. During 2013 and 2014, large sums of money, which were business receipts, were deposited into Windsor’s personal bank account. These funds were payments from only one client. All other business receipts from other company customers were deposited in Windsor’s business account.
Most of the sales deposited into Windsor’s personal account were not reported on his returns, causing the gross receipts to be underreported on Windsor’s tax documentation in 2013 and 2014.
Columbus, Ohio: Businessman David Fachman, of New Albany, Ohio, has pleaded guilty to one count of failure to pay over tax to the IRS.
Since at least 1998, Fachman owned and operated The Scarefactory, a haunted house and special effects supplier. From at least 2015 through 2018, Fachman withheld and collected the trust fund portion of the employment taxes from employees’ paychecks but failed to file timely and remit the payment to the IRS. For example, on Halloween of 2018, Fachman had an obligation to file a Form 941 and pay over $26,226.02 in employee withheld federal employment taxes, which he failed to file or pay over.
He failed to pay over employee and employer federal employment taxes totaling $547,854.73.
He faces a maximum of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
Sacramento, California: Former University of California/Davis veterinarian Jack Ray Snyder, 63, of Wellington, Florida, has been sentenced to six months in prison, six months of home detention and a $30,000 fine for tax evasion.
Snyder underreported his income in 2011, 2012 and 2013 and deducted ineligible items in 2011 and 2014, resulting in an additional tax liability of some $134,497.
He was also ordered to pay that amount in restitution.
Virginia Beach, Virginia: Businessman Richard Yanek has pleaded guilty to defrauding the IRS out of more than $2.5 million of taxes by, among other things, hiding assets, making false statements about his ability to pay, using a nominee company to conduct business and diverting huge sums of money to pay creditors instead of the IRS.
Yanek has owned and operated a credit card processing business since at least 1995. Between 2013 and 2018, he withheld employment taxes from his employees but failed to consistently pay more than a $1 million of those withholdings to the IRS. Each year, Yanek provided false employment tax forms to his employees, who filed their own taxes and mistakenly believed that the amounts withheld from their wages had been paid to the Social Security program.
Yanek had not filed a personal income tax return or paid personal income taxes since 2010, despite earning and spending millions of dollars on the mortgage for his oceanfront home, personal credit cards, private school tuition and golf and yacht club dues. He had his personal tax returns prepared by his accountant for the years 2011 through 2015, all of which reported substantial taxes due and owing. But Yanek intentionally chose not to file these returns with the IRS, and he later made false statements to the IRS and law enforcement when asked why those returns had not been filed.
Sentencing is Sept. 27. He faces a maximum of five years in prison.
Buffalo, New York: Ronald Rechan, of Douglasville, Georgia, has pleaded guilty to making a false statement on a bank loan application and to tax evasion.
In 2017, Rechan submitted a $150,000 home loan application that fraudulently overstated his income. Between April 2013 and January 2018, he also committed tax evasion: While serving as a CFO, Rechan paid himself $1,962,167.21, and to avoid paying tax on this income he paid personal expenses directly from a company account and deposited $332,746.19 into a nominee bank account.
His actions resulted in a tax loss to the IRS of $628,144.
The charges carry a maximum of 30 years in prison and a fine of $1,000,000.
