A Virginia businessman was sentenced to six years and six months in prison for evading the payment of employment taxes, filing false tax returns, and obstructing the IR, officials stated Monday.
According to court documents and evidence presented at trial, James C. Jones Jr. owned and operated Lifeline Ambulance Service Inc. between approximately January 2008 and December 2009.
He was responsible for paying to the IRS approximately $200,000 in Social Security, Medicare, and income taxes withheld from his employees’ wages.
After Jones failed to do so, the IRS assessed the outstanding employment taxes against him.
When the IRS attempted to collect those taxes, Jones lied, claiming that he did not have the assets to pay the taxes.
In fact, Jones owned several Caribbean beachfront condominiums, multiple foreign bank accounts and a classic “muscle” car collection.
Jones later continued trying to thwart the IRS’s collection efforts by filing false 2013 through 2018 tax returns that did not report the rental income from his Caribbean properties and claimed false deductions.
After the Justice Department subpoenaed Jones for records of foreign bank accounts, he falsely reported that he did not have any responsive records when, in fact, he possessed those records as the director and owner of several foreign holding companies.
Jones’s conduct caused a tax loss to the IRS of at least $1.5 million.
In addition to his prison sentence, U.S. District Judge Michael F. Urbanski for the Western District of Virginia ordered Jones to pay a fine of $250,000 and $394,508 in restitution to the federal government.
Jones was also ordered to pay the costs of prosecution.
IRS Criminal Investigation investigated the case.
Trial Attorneys Francesca Bartolomey, Todd Ellinwood, Brian Flanagan of the Justice Department’s Tax Division, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Charlene Day for the Western District of Virginia prosecuted the case.