Date: March 6, 2025
Contact: newsroom@ci.irs.gov
PROVIDENCE — A Rhode Island businesswoman who collected but failed to pay over to the government eight years’ worth of employee federal withholding taxes and properly report her own personal income to the IRS has been sentenced to two years of probation, the first three months to be served in home detention, announced Acting United States Attorney Sara Miron Bloom.
Gail M. Hynson president of Hynson Electrical Services, Inc., pleaded guilty in October 2024 to ten counts of failure to account for and pay over payroll taxes and three counts of filing a false tax return. In addition to a term of probation and home detention, U.S. District Court Chief Judge John J. McConnell, Jr., ordered Hynson to perform 100 hours of community service.
Court documents detail that from 2016 through 2024, Hynson, who also acted as the company bookkeeper, withheld employment taxes from its employees’ paychecks, to include federal income taxes, Medicare, and Social Security taxes, but failed to provide the funds to the IRS.
Much of the money deducted from her employees’ paychecks was transferred to her own personal bank accounts and used to pay for personal expenses, including her mortgage, car payments, and her daughter’s student loans.
In addition, court records provide that Gail Hynson and her husband submitted false personal tax returns to the IRS, failing to reflect their actual income, which income included company tax withholdings earmarked for the IRS. Although those funds should have been paid to the IRS, Hynson transferred them to her personal bank account and used them for personal expenses.
Between 2016 and 2024, Hyson failed to remit a total of approximately $1.22 million dollars to the IRS.
The case was prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorneys Ly T. Chin and Milind M. Shah.
The matter was investigated by the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI).
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 90% federal conviction rate. The agency has 20 field offices located across the U.S. and 14 attaché posts abroad.