Date: July 19, 2024 Contact: newsroom@ci.irs.gov Roanoke, VA — The owner of Blue Ridge Bookkeeping, a Roanoke-based payroll processing and tax preparation business, was sentenced today in federal court to 36 months in prison for wire fraud and filing a false tax return. Brian Hoeppner of Roanoke, Virginia, previously pled guilty to one count of wire fraud and one count of willfully making and subscribing a false tax return. According to court documents, Hoeppner owned and operated Blue Ridge Bookkeeping and had several clients for whom he was hired to do various financial-related work. One client hired Hoeppner to handle her company’s payroll, file the company’s employment tax returns, and submit all related paperwork and payments to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) that her company owed. From at least September 2012 through December 2019, Hoeppner billed this client for her company’s employment taxes, however, rather than pay these taxes to the IRS, he spent the money on personal expenses. As a result, her company’s employment taxes went unpaid. When the IRS sent notices to this client about her company’s failure to pay its employment taxes, Hoeppner falsely assured this client that “he had a guy at the IRS” who was sorting things out. After several years of IRS notices, this client demanded that she accompany Hoeppner to a meeting he had set up with the IRS, and just before the time of the scheduled meeting, Hoeppner admitted to her that he had been stealing her company’s payments. In all, Hoeppner stole over $125,000 from this client’s company. As of December 2019, this client was still responsible for paying over $240,500 in taxes, penalties, interest, and costs, and nearly had to shutter her business in order to be able to come into compliance with the IRS. In addition to his prison sentence, Hoeppner was ordered to pay $58,361 in restitution to this client and $218,445.32 in restitution to the IRS. This investigation also uncovered that, from 2009 through 2013, Hoeppner stole employment taxes from at least one other client. In addition to accruing a debt to the IRS of over $10,000, the owners also discovered that Hoeppner stole a $14,112 tax refund check the IRS had issued to the company. Hoeppner filed his own false personal income tax returns by failing to report his embezzlement income on his tax returns and by falsely overreporting the amount of tax withholdings that he had paid over to the IRS. United States Attorney Christopher R. Kavanaugh, and Special Agent in Charge of the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation (IRS CI) Washington, D.C. Field Office Kareem Carter made the announcement. The IRS CI investigated the case. Assistant U.S. Attorney Jason M. Scheff prosecuted the case. 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. 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.
