Accounting
Tax Fraud Blotter: In the gutter
Host of problems; comp it; plan to fail; and other highlights of recent tax cases.
Portland, Maine: Colleen Holt-Thompson, of Kentucky, has been sentenced to three years of probation and ordered to pay $172,158.79 in restitution for conspiracy to commit visa fraud and for tax evasion.
Holt-Thompson founded Host Ukraine in 2015 in Newport, Kentucky, and served as the nonprofit’s executive director. The organization brought children living in orphanages in Ukraine to stay with American families for short periods over the summer or winter holidays. Host Ukraine was required to have the permission of the Ministry of Social Policy in Ukraine to transport each child, and the name and address of a hosting family was required before permission would be granted. Once permission was granted, the U.S. embassy in Kyiv, Ukraine, would issue a non-immigrant visa to the child. Between 2015 and 2019, Thompson applied for and received ministry hosting permission for 828 U.S. non-immigrant visas for Ukrainian children.
To obtain the visas, Holt-Thompson provided placeholder names — names and addresses of American families who had not actually agreed to serve as hosts — when she submitted names of Ukrainian children to the Ministry. Before the children traveled to the U.S., she would find actual host families for each child. During the period of the conspiracy, a conspirator who lived in Maine and was the Northeast contact for Host Ukraine was responsible for identifying placeholder families in Maine and recruiting families to serve as host families for the Ukrainian children who traveled to the U.S. on fraudulently obtained visas. Host families were charged a $3,000 fee to host a child; Host Ukraine collected donations.
In 2016, Holt-Thompson spent some $127,610 in personal expenses and paid for those expenses from Host Ukraine’s checking account or paid personal credit card bills using that checking account.
Money spent on personal expenses was not reported as income on the return that Holt-Thompson and her husband filed; she reported her taxable income for that year as only $47,226. She also failed to file a return for Host Ukraine.
Buffalo, New York: Workers’ comp claim handler Maureen Holleran has pleaded guilty to filing a false return.
Between September 2015 and October 2023, Holleran worked remotely as a workers’ comp handler for an insurance company in Canada. She evaluated and paid workers’ comp claims for policies issued by the company. Holleran had authority to send payments to a claimant of up to $2,000 without further approval by her supervisor. Between July 2020 and June 2023, Holleran submitted more than 1,200 fraudulent claims in the insurance company’s processing system, each claim below the $2,000 threshold. Claims were paid into bank accounts controlled by Holleran. She created fictitious expenses, such as claims for lost wages and reimbursements for medical supplies and copays, to justify the fraudulent payments.
She submitted some $2.37 million in fraudulent claims, creating fictitious email accounts that appeared to be associated with the policy claimant, then used these email addresses to sign up for the insurance company’s client portal. She then input her own banking information into the portal.
For 2020 through 2022, Holleran embezzled some $1,592,095 from the company that she failed to report on her income tax returns for those years. The IRS estimates that the tax for these tax years is $545,792.
Sentencing is Nov. 4. The charge carries a maximum of three years in prison and a fine of $250,000.
Jackson, Mississippi: A U.S. District Court has entered permanent injunctions against Thomas Walt Dallas, Jason Todd Mardis and Capital Preservation Services to bar them from making statements about tax benefits for compensation, among other relief. The defendants consented to the injunctions.
According to the complaint, Dallas, Mardis and Capital Preservation Services marketed a tax scheme at numerous professional conferences and media appearances, targeting medical professionals and small-business owners. They allegedly falsely claimed that customers following “Tax Plans” could claim multiple deductions to which they were in fact not entitled. This included claims that customers’ businesses could deduct large, unnecessary “marketing fees” to marketing companies; that those companies could employ family members and deduct family meals, vehicle expenses and tuition, among other items; and that customers could “rent” homes to businesses short-term at exorbitant rates and avoid taxes on the rental income.
The alleged harm from the scheme could be as much as $130 million in tax revenue since 2014.
Lewisville, Texas: Bookkeeper Barbara Chalmers has been sentenced to 10 years in prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release, for a scheme to embezzle at least $29 million from her employer, a charitable foundation and other companies run by a Dallas family.
She admitted that starting in at least 2012 she used her position as bookkeeper for the family’s companies and her signatory authority over bank accounts to write herself at least 175 checks that she deposited into her personal accounts. She also provided false paperwork to tax preparers that misstated year-end cash-on-hand for the accounts from which she was embezzling.
Chalmers used more than $25 million of the stolen money to fund a construction business; she used $6 million to pay off credit card debt.
She was also ordered to pay $44,809,438 in restitution to her victims.
Rochester, New York: Business owner Jeffrey Tome, 62, has pleaded guilty to filing a false return.
Tome owns Tome Enterprises Inc., which provides gutter repair and installation services. For 2017 through 2021, he failed to deposit 1,679 customer checks totaling $1,719,283.45 into the business bank account, instead cashing the checks at a local check-cashing business.
Tome then intentionally failed to advise the business’ tax preparer of the money received from cashing the business checks, resulting in the $1,719,283.45 not being reported on the corporate income tax returns.
He failed to include the net profits from the corporation as income on his personal federal income tax returns, resulting in his failing to pay personal income taxes of $330,137. He also paid his employees $407,573.60 in cash, which represented wages for which payroll taxes should have been paid. The payroll taxes that Tome failed to pay totaled $62,358.76.
Sentencing is Dec. 11. Tome faces up to three years in prison and a fine of $250,000.
New York: Business owner Nicholas Arcuri, of Staten Island, has pleaded guilty to failing to collect and pay over employment taxes from his company’s employees.
Between 2015 and 2021, Arcuri, owner and president of Capri Upholstery Custom Furnishing, paid some $2.6 million in off-the-books cash to employees, from which he did not withhold Social Security, Medicare or income taxes or pay over those taxes to the IRS. Arcuri also concealed the cash payroll from his return preparer.
In total, Arcuri caused a tax loss to the IRS of $486,753.
Sentencing is Jan. 23. He faces up to five years in prison as well as a period of supervised release, restitution and monetary penalties.
Sunrise, Florida: Resident Yolanda Dewar has pleaded guilty to filing false federal returns to fraudulently obtain refunds.
Between 2018 and 2020, she created a trust and filed four false returns on behalf of the trust for nearly $2 million in refunds. Dewar continued filing such returns even after the IRS notified her that her claims were frivolous and had no basis in law. Nevertheless, the IRS issued nearly $500,000 to the trust in response to Dewar’s false claims.
Dewar allegedly used a portion of those refunds to purchase a car for a family member, get plastic surgery and renovate her home.
Sentencing is Oct. 24. She faces up to three years in prison, a period of supervised release, restitution and monetary penalties.
Big Four firm PwC announced new agentic AI capacities, including a model that proactively identifies areas of value leakage and acts inside the tools teams already use to fix them itself.
The new solution,
The software, which is supported by PwC’s recently released
The system connects directly into ERP environments, continuously monitors key metrics, and acts inside the tools teams already use. For example, a supply chain agent might detect rising shipping costs and automatically reroute deliveries to reduce spend. Finance agents can spot and correct billing errors before they reach the customer. Clients typically see measurable efficiency gains in the first quarter, with continued improvements over time as the system learns and adapts.
“Too many transformations still rely on one-off pilots and stale data, stretching the gap from insight to impact and suffocating ROI,” said Saurabh Sarbaliya, PwC’s principal for enterprise strategy and value. “Agent Powered Performance flips the economics by distilling PwC’s industry transformation playbooks into AI agents that turn static insights into compounding gains, without rebooting each time.”
Agent Powered Performance is platform-agnostic and built on an open architecture so it can work across different LLMs based on client preferences and task-specific needs. It works with major enterprise platforms including Oracle, SAP, Workday and Guidewire.
Agent OS Model Context Protocol
PwC also
By integrating this standard, agent systems registered as MCP servers can be used by any authorized AI agent. This reduces redundant integration work and the overhead of writing custom logic for each new use case. By standardizing how agents invoke tools and handle responses, MCP also simplifies the interface between agents and enterprise systems, which will serve to reduce development time, lower testing complexity, and cut deployment risk. Finally, any interaction between an agent and an MCP server is authenticated, authorized and logged, and access policies are enforced at the protocol level, which means that compliance and control are native to the system—not layered on after the fact.
This means that agents are no longer siloed. Instead, they can operate as part of a coordinated, governed system that can grow as needs evolve, as MCP support provides the interface to external tools and systems. This enables organizations to move beyond isolated pilots toward integrated systems where agents don’t just reason, but act inside real business workflows. It marks a shift from experimentation to adoption, from isolated tools to scalable, governed intelligence.
Research Composer
Finally, a PwC spokesperson said the firm has also launched a new internal tool for its professionals called Research Composer, a patent-pending AI research agent embedded in the firm’s ChatPwC suite, designed to accelerate insight generation by combining web data with PwC-uploaded content.
Professionals will use the Research Composer to produce in-depth, citation-backed reports for either the firm or its clients. The solution is intended to enhance the quality of client work by equipping teams with research and strategic analysis capabilities.
The AI agent prompts users through a step-by-step research workflow, allowing them to shape how reports are packaged—tailoring the output to meet strategic needs. For example, a manager in advisory services might use Research Composer to evaluate white space opportunities across industries or geographies, drawing from internal reports and up-to-date market data.
Eide Bailly, a Top 25 Firm based in Fargo, North Dakota, is growing its presence in the Pacific Northwest by adding Traner Smith, based in Edmonds, Washington, effective June 2, 2025.
Traner Smith’s team includes two partners and 16 staff members and specializes in tax compliance and advisory services. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Eide Bailly ranked No. 19 on
Eide Bailly already has offices in Seattle, but hopes to grow further in the Pacific Northwest. “We’re pleased to welcome the talented team at Traner Smith to Eide Bailly,” said Eide Bailly managing partner and CEO Jeremy Hauk in a statement Monday. “Their expertise with high-net-worth individuals, real estate and privately held businesses aligns well with our strengths, and their client-centric approach is a perfect cultural fit. Having an office in Edmonds, Washington, is a great complement to our existing presence in Seattle. Together, we’re poised to deliver even greater value to families and businesses in the Seattle metro area.”
“Joining Eide Bailly is a natural next step for us — it provides access to deeper technical resources in areas like state and local tax, national tax, succession planning and international tax while allowing us to continue the personalized service our clients value,” said Kevin Smith, a partner at Traner Smith, in a statement.
“With this expanded support and platform, we’re excited to grow our reach, elevate what we do best, and help more clients than ever before,” said Shane Summer, another partner at Traner Smith, in a statement.
Eide Bailly has announced several other mergers in recent weeks. Earlier this month, it added
In 2023, Eide Bailly added
Top 100 firm
“We began working with Knuula in Spring 2024 to streamline our engagement letter process,” said Don Murphy, Managing Member of BMSS. “It quickly became clear that Knuula was not only a strong solution for us, but also an ideal partner in advancing industry-wide automation.”
While the specific terms of the deal were not disclosed, a spokesperson with Knuula said that, after this investment, BMSS and a collection of 21 of their partners now own 13% of the company. The investment represents not some passive revenue deal but an active collaboration between the two companies, with the spokesperson saying they will be working closely together on things like product development, new features, improvements, and networking.
The deal comes about a year after Knuula integrated with QuickFee, a receivables management platform for professional service providers, which allowed users to have engagement letters directly connecting to their QuickFee billing platform, tying the execution of the letter directly to the billing process.
“We’ve long sought to partner with a firm focused on strategic innovation in the accounting space,” said Jamie Peebles, founder of Knuula. “To develop a perfect solution for large firms, it is ideal to have a partner that is willing to work closely together and iterate quickly. This requires constant feedback between our two teams. The IT team from BMSS worked with our development team constantly and helped us iterate rapidly. We also had consistent input from partners, manager, and administrative staff to help us make valuable changes to Knuula. BMSS was a perfect partner for us.”
PwC AI agent acts proactively to preserve value
Eide Bailly merges in Traner Smith
BMSS announces investment, collaboration with Knuula
New 2023 K-1 instructions stir the CAMT pot for partnerships and corporations
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