Insult to injury; lack of progress; gone fishing; and other highlights of recent tax cases.
Los Angeles: Christopher Kazuo Kamon, former longtime head of the accounting department at a now-shuttered personal injury law firm, has been sentenced to 10 years and a month in prison for enabling the embezzlement of millions of dollars from the firm’s clients and for embezzling money from the firm itself.
Kamon, formerly of Encino and Palos Verdes, California, and who was residing in the Bahamas at the time of his November 2022 arrest, was also ordered to pay $8,903,324 in restitution. He pleaded guilty in October.
From 2004 until December 2020, Kamon was the head of the accounting department at the law firm Girardi Keese. He worked closely with co-defendant Thomas Vincent Girardi as well as other senior lawyers at the law firm.
In December 2020, Girardi Keese’s creditors forced the firm into bankruptcy proceedings. The firm dissolved in January 2021 and the State Bar of California disbarred Girardi in July 2022. Girardi has since been found guilty of four counts of wire fraud; he awaits sentencing.
Akron, Ohio: Businessman Michael Roberts, 38, of Mentor, Ohio, has been convicted of not paying federal employment taxes.
He was the executive director and co-owner of Progressive Alternatives, an in-home care business that served individuals with developmental disabilities. The business was initially purchased by Roberts’s spouse, Larry Keith Gildersleeve III, 43, also of Mentor, in February 2011. Eventually Roberts assumed responsibility for the payroll and day-to-day financial operations and assumed the title of co-owner in 2014.
Investigators found that Progressive’s records showed that payroll checks issued by Roberts reflected appropriate withholdings; the withholdings were also reflected on W-2s the employees received, but it was also discovered that Progressive never filed W-2s for employees nor submitted 941s with quarterly payments.
In late 2017, an employee who was preparing to retire was informed by the Social Security Administration that Progressive had not paid over payroll taxes to the IRS. Although Roberts was made aware of this and taxes were withheld from employee paychecks, he did not submit payments to the IRS.
Roberts was determined to be guilty of not paying taxes for quarters ending Dec. 31, 2017, and March 31, 2018, for a total of $226,687.25. Gildersleeve pleaded guilty in October to eight counts of failure to account for and pay over taxes, including the two quarters for which Roberts was also found guilty. Gildersleeve’s remaining counts included two quarters in 2018 and three in 2019 for a total unpaid of $466,280.25.
Roberts will be sentenced on July 17, when he will face up to 10 years in prison. Gildersleeve, scheduled to be sentenced in April, faced up to 40 years.
Houston: Joseph Patrick Butler has admitted to fraudulent and false statements on his federal returns.
He admitted that between 2013 to 2020 he filed false joint 1040s and received inflated refunds. Butler acknowledged creating shell companies that issued W-2s to himself, falsely reporting hundreds of thousands of dollars in wages and significant withholdings each year. In reality, he earned no such wages, and no taxes had been withheld.
Butler’s scheme resulted in a tax loss exceeding $260,000 in fraudulent refunds.
Sentencing is July 18. Butler faces up to three years in prison and a possible $250,000 fine.
El Paso, Texas: Businessman Edward Dean La Puma has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for failure to account for and pay over trust fund taxes.
La Puma was founder and sole proprietor of 77 Stone, a granite countertop business, and failed to account for and pay over trust fund taxes for 20 tax periods, from the first quarter of 2018 through the last quarter of 2022. The tax loss was $818,096.
La Puma was indicted for 20 counts a year ago and pleaded guilty to one count in November. He agreed to pay $383,551 in restitution to the IRS.
Miami: Businessman Paul Walczak has been sentenced to 18 months in prison and two years of supervised release for failing to pay over employment taxes and failing to file individual income tax returns.
Walczak controlled a network of interconnected health care companies operating under various names, including Palm Health Partners. Through another of his entities, Palm Health Partners Employment Services, he employed more than 600 people and paid more than $24 million annually in payroll. In 2011, Walczak did not pay two quarters of withheld taxes to the IRS.
The next year, the IRS began collection efforts, including by sending Walczak notices about his unpaid taxes and by meeting with him. When that was unsuccessful, the IRS assessed the outstanding taxes against him personally. Walczak paid the assessments in October 2014, but by the end of the following year he was again withholding taxes from employees’ paychecks and keeping the money; from 2016 through 2019, Walczak withheld $7,432,223.80 of taxes but did not pay the money over to the IRS.
He used more than $1 million from his businesses to buy a yacht, transferred hundreds of thousands of dollars to his personal bank accounts and used the business accounts for personal purchases at retailers such as Bergdorf Goodman, Cartier and Saks. During this time, he also did not pay $3,480,111 of his business’ portion of his employees’ Social Security and Medicare taxes.
By 2019, the IRS had assessed millions of dollars in civil penalties against Walczak. Beginning with the 2018 tax year, he also stopped filing personal income tax returns despite still receiving more than $800,000 in income. That year, Walczak created a new business, NextEra, using a family member as the nominal owner but retaining control of the company’s finances and operations.
Through NextEra, Walczak transferred in 2020 almost $200,000 to a bank account titled in a family member’s name, more than $250,000 to an account in his wife’s name and more than $800,000 in payments directly to third parties for Walczak’s personal expenses, including clothing stores, department stores and fishing retailers.
Walczak, who caused a total federal tax loss of $10,912,334.80, was also ordered to pay $4,381,265.76 in restitution to the United States.
San Antonio: Tax preparer Sandy Gonzalez, 44, of Von Ormy, Texas, has been sentenced to two years in prison for aiding or assisting the filing of a false return.
Gonzalez operated at least two tax prep services, SV Tax and JNC Tax Professionals, from Jan. 1, 2018, and April 15, 2021. During that time, Gonzalez prepared 1040s for clients that she knew contained false and fraudulent information. Primarily, she reduced the amount of clients’ reportable income by deducting losses on Schedule C for businesses that were either inflated or did not exist.
She was indicted for 10 counts a year ago and pleaded guilty to one count in December 2024.
She was also ordered to pay $297,777 in restitution.
Miami: A U.S. district court has issued an injunction against tax preparer Nia Daniel that bars her from preparing returns for others, having an ownership stake in any tax prep firm, or assisting or training others in tax prep through at least Jan. 27, 2028.
The complaint alleged that Daniel understated clients’ tax liability and claimed inflated refunds largely by falsifying or overstating business expenses; claiming the Work Opportunity Tax Credit for clients who did not qualify; falsely claiming other credits, such as the American Opportunity Credit and Residential Energy Credit; and falsifying income and filing status to inflate the Earned Income Tax Credit.
According to the complaint, the IRS estimated a tax loss of more than $500,000 in 2023 alone from returns prepared by Daniel.
The court also ordered Daniel to disgorge $446,000 she’d received from her tax prep business. Daniel agreed to both the injunction and the disgorgement.