Last month, we reported about a co-owner of several bars in Statesboro, Georgia (and former City Councilman) William Britt, who was convicted of tax evasion for manipulating the income of several bars he and others owned in the area. Well, guess what? Apparently, it was a family deal, as Eugene R. Britt III, aka Trey Britt, plead guilty not long after that. His plea stated he and others engaged in a scheme to evade taxes owed to the IRS on income from bars and a restaurant he and others owned. Evidence admitted into the court showed that Britt and the other true owners skimmed cash from the establishments and disbursed it amongst themselves in accordance with their ownership percentages without reporting that income to the IRS.
All too often, we report some of the same old schemes in this section, but a convicted felon, Quin Ngoc Rudin, in California – on supervised release for previous financial scheming – was recently convicted for conspiring with others in schemes to defraud the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), a federal loans initiative designed to help businesses pay their employees and meet expenses during the COVID-19 pandemic. We’re not talking about a few thousand dollars, either. The fraud loss to the U.S. government stemming from the PPP scheme exceeded $43 million. Besides the sentence of a decade in prison, it’s expected Rudin will face serious financial reparations and punitive actions as well.
As we mentioned above, all too often, we see the exact same “Dirty Doze” schemes parlayed month after month, so it’s nice when we’re assured there are some “teeth” to the punishments meted out. A federal court in the Southern District of Florida has ordered a return preparer operating in the West Palm Beach area to pay $213,500 in fees he received for preparing tax returns in violation of a permanent injunction that barred him from filing, preparing, or helping to prepare federal tax returns for others. Hopefully, Nate E. Dameus will stay out of the business from now on!
Sincerely,
