NEWPORT NEWS, Va. - A Chesapeake man and business owner pleaded guilty Tuesday to tax fraud.
defrauding the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) out of more than $1.2 million in taxes.
According to court documents, from 2013 through 2017 36-year-old Shane August owned and operated a home-healthcare business in Chesapeake.
Court documents say August defrauded the IRS out of $1.2 million. They say he did it by, among other things, hiding personal bank accounts, using undisclosed accounts to conduct business, maintaining a cash lifestyle to avoid the IRS, making false statements about his ability to pay, lying to IRS agents, and diverting large sums of money to pay for personal expenses.
August plead guilty to withholding employment taxes from about 60 of his employees and failed to consistently pay more than $900,000 of those withholdings to the IRS.
Each year, documents say August provided fraudulent employment tax forms to his employees. They filed their own taxes thinking that the amounts withheld from their wages had been paid to the Social Security program.
According to officials, between 2014 to 2017 August reported personal income of more than $900,000, but did not pay taxes on it. He owes more than $288,000.
August is scheduled to be sentenced on March 24, 2022. He faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison.
