Clarksville home business owner sent to prison for filing false tax returns

 

Date: November 1, 2023

Contact: newsroom@ci.irs.gov

NASHVILLE — David Haley of Clarksville, Tennessee was sentenced yesterday to two years in federal prison for filing false tax returns that omitted income he earned from his business, announced U.S. Attorney Henry C. Leventis for the Middle District of Tennessee and Acting Deputy Assistant Attorney General Stuart M. Goldberg of the Justice Department's Tax Division. Haley was also ordered to pay a fine of $5,000 and restitution in the amount of $186,290. Upon release from prison, he will be subject to one year of supervised release.

In November 2022, Haley was convicted of three counts of filing false tax returns for tax years 2015, 2016, and 2017. The jury acquitted Haley of one count of filing a false tax return relating to his 2014 tax filing. According to court documents and evidence presented at trial, Haley owned Haley & Associates Mechanical Contractors, a heating and plumbing business. From 2014 through 2017, Haley & Associates was hired as the subcontractor on commercial projects in middle Tennessee and was paid more than $1,000,000 for each year. Generally, the contractors that hired Haley & Associates paid via check and reported the payments to the IRS via Forms 1099-MISC as non-employee compensation. Even though Haley personally received a portion of the company's earnings as business income and nonemployee compensation, Haley reported earning no income on his 2014-2017 tax returns. Haley's failure to report that income on his tax returns for tax years 2015 through 2017 caused the IRS a loss of approximately $186,290.

IRS Criminal Investigation (CI) investigated the case.

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Kathryn W. Booth and Mitchell T. Galloway are prosecuting 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.