Owner of Arkansas Tree Service Business Sentenced to 20 Months for Tax Fraud

The owner of an Arkansas tree service business has been sentenced to 20 months in prison for tax fraud after failing to report over $3 million in revenue.

Carlos Gonzalez, 59, of Rogers, Arkansas, was convicted of filing false income tax returns that substantially underreported his business income.

According to court records, Gonzalez, the owner of Charley’s Tree Service, cashed more than $3 million in customer checks between 2014 and 2020.

Instead of depositing the funds into his business bank account, Gonzalez withheld information about these cashed checks from his tax preparer, who relied on bank records to prepare his returns.

As a result, the tax returns significantly underreported the gross receipts from Charley’s Tree Service, causing a tax loss of more than $900,000 to the IRS.

In addition to the prison sentence, U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Brooks for the Western District of Arkansas ordered Gonzalez to serve one year of supervised release and to pay approximately $1.4 million in restitution to the United States and the State of Arkansas.

The case was announced by Acting Deputy Assistant Attorney General Stuart M. Goldberg of the Justice Department’s Tax Division and U.S. Attorney David Clay Fowlkes for the Western District of Arkansas.

The investigation was conducted by IRS Criminal Investigation, and the case was prosecuted by Trial Attorneys Curtis Weidler and Wilson Stamm of the Tax Division, along with Assistant U.S. Attorney Carly Marshall for the Western District of Arkansas.

This article, "Owner of Arkansas Tree Service Business Sentenced to 20 Months for Tax Fraud" was first published on Small Business Trends