Harrisburg woman pleads guilty to failing to collect and pay employment taxes

 

Date: November 1, 2022

Contact: newsroom@ci.irs.gov

HARRISBURG — The United States Attorney's Office for the Middle District of Pennsylvania announced today that Dary T. Son, of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, pleaded guilty before U.S. District Court Judge Sylvia H. Rambo to failing to collect and pay over employment taxes to the Internal Revenue Service.

According to United States Attorney Gerard M. Karam, from June 2015 through August 2019, Son, the owner of a Pennsylvania-based temporary staffing company, DS Agency, failed to collect and pay on behalf of her employees approximately $591,822.99 in taxes owed to the IRS. She also failed to pay to the IRS an equivalent amount that she owed as their employer.

From 2015 to 2019, DS Agency received and cashed checks from Son Associates for providing workers in the total amount of over $7.7 million. Rather than depositing these payments in a bank account, Dary Son cashed these checks at a check cashing business in Harrisburg, from 2015 to mid-2017. Starting in 2018, Dary Son regularly made trips to a check cashing business in Philadelphia, where Dary Son cashed about $3 million in checks in less than a year.

The workers employed by Dary Son and her family member's companies, worked regularly at several food manufacturing facilities in and around the Middle District of Pennsylvania. Several of them were transported to their work sites by Dary Son, and they were generally paid in cash.

Dary Son never withheld any federal, Social Security, Medicare, or state taxes from her employees' income. She likewise did not pay her employer portion of these taxes. As a result, she is responsible for $1,183,646.25 in unpaid federal taxes, which she has agreed to pay in restitution as part of her plea agreement.

The case was investigated by the IRS Criminal Investigation. Assistant U.S. Attorney Ravi Romel Sharma is prosecuting the case.

The maximum penalty for this offense under federal law is five years of imprisonment, a term of supervised release following imprisonment, and a fine of up to $250,000. A sentence following a finding of guilt is imposed by the Judge after consideration of the applicable federal sentencing statutes and the Federal Sentencing Guidelines.