Date: Dec. 11, 2024 Contact: newsroom@ci.irs.gov BOSTON — A Dorchester man was sentenced yesterday in federal court in Boston to a multi-year tax fraud scheme in which he failed to pay employment taxes for his temporary employment agency. Det Tran was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Leo T. Sorokin to one year and a day in prison, to be followed by three years supervised release and ordered to pay more than $2.5 million in restitution. In September 2024, Tran pleaded guilty to two counts of failure to collect and pay over employment taxes. From at least 2018 through 2021, Tran owned and operated HTP Temp. Inc. (HTP), an agency that provided temporary workers for client businesses. During that time, Tran paid $8 million in “off the books” cash wages to HTP employees. Through his concealment of these cash wages, Tran caused his accountant to prepare false quarterly filings to the IRS for HTP’s employee wages and tax withholdings between 2018 and 2021. As a result, Tran evaded more than $2.1 million in employment taxes owed to the IRS. United States Attorney Joshua S. Levy and Jonathan Wlodyka, Acting Special Agent in Charge of the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) in Boston made the announcement. The United States Attorney’s Office would also like to thank the Insurance Fraud Bureau of Massachusetts for their assistance. Assistant U.S. Attorney Benjamin A. Saltzman of the Securities, Financial & Cyber Fraud Unit prosecuted the case. IRS-CI is the criminal investigative arm of the IRS, responsible for conducting financial crime investigations, including tax fraud, narcotics trafficking, money-laundering, public corruption, healthcare fraud, identity theft and more. IRS-CI special agents are the only federal law enforcement agents with investigative jurisdiction over violations of the Internal Revenue Code, obtaining a more than a 90 percent federal conviction rate. The agency has 20 field offices located across the U.S. and 12 attaché posts abroad.
