Date: Nov. 20, 2024 Contact: newsroom@ci.irs.gov A North Carolina man was sentenced today to one year and one day in prison for not paying more than $2 million in employment taxes. According to court documents and statements made in court, George Taylor Jr., of Wilmington, North Carolina, owned and operated National Speed, a high-performance automotive services business. As the chairman and president of National Speed, Taylor was responsible for withholding Social Security, Medicare and income taxes from his employees’ wages and paying those taxes to the IRS. From 2014 through 2021, Taylor withheld employment taxes from his employees’ paychecks but did not pay those taxes over to the IRS, nor did he file the necessary employment tax returns. He executed the scheme by using an accounting software to calculate the taxes to be withheld from his employees’ paychecks, but after withholding the taxes, he simply kept the funds for himself and his business ventures. In total, Taylor caused a tax loss to the IRS of $2,272,072. In addition to the term of imprisonment, U.S. District Judge Richard Myers II for the Eastern District of North Carolina ordered Taylor to serve three years of supervised release and pay approximately $2,615,534 in restitution to the United States. Acting Deputy Assistant Attorney General Stuart M. Goldberg of the Justice Department’s Tax Division and U.S. Attorney Michael F. Easley Jr. for the Eastern District of North Carolina made the announcement. IRS Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) investigated the case. Trial Attorney Brian Flanagan of the Tax Division and Assistant U.S. Attorney Ethan Ontjes for the Eastern District of North Carolina 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.
