Date: March 22, 2024 Contact: newsroom@ci.irs.gov PHILADELPHIA — United States Attorney Jacqueline C. Romero announced that Donna Fecondo of Garnet Valley, PA, was sentenced by United States District Court Judge Mitchell S. Goldberg to 46 months in federal prison for tax crimes. Fecondo was also ordered to pay restitution. Fecondo pleaded guilty in 2022, admitting that she failed to remit employment (payroll) taxes to the IRS, with a loss to the government, for the years charged in the indictment, of approximately $600,000, and failed to file corporate and personal income tax returns. Fecondo was the president and sole owner of Joseph Silvestri & Son, a/k/a Joseph Silvestri & Son, Inc. (“JSSI”). JSSI was a business operating a mushroom farm, with its principal place of business in Garnet Valley. As the sole owner of JSSI, Fecondo was responsible for collecting, accounting for, and paying over employment taxes. JSSI paid its employees weekly and was required by the IRS to electronically deposit its payroll taxes weekly. Fecondo withheld the taxes from her employees’ pay but did not remit the taxes to the IRS. Fecondo did not timely file Forms 943, Employer’s Annual Federal Tax Return for Agricultural Employees, for tax years 2013 through 2016. Instead, Fecondo filed the Forms 943 for tax years 2013 through 2016 in or about July 2017, well after the due dates and after the Internal Revenue Service had contacted her about her failure to pay employment taxes and her failure to file returns. Although Fecondo reported substantial payroll taxes due and owing on the Form 943 for tax years 2013 through 2016 that she made in July 2017, and although JSSI withheld employment taxes from JSSI’s employees’ wages, Fecondo did not pay over any employment taxes to the IRS for those tax years. In total, for tax years 2013 through 2016, Fecondo should have withheld and remitted to the IRS a total of approximately $1,255,068.94 in employment taxes, but instead she remitted nothing. Of this amount, Fecondo should have withheld and remitted to the IRS a total of approximately $599,159.94 related to tax years 2015 and 2016, but instead remitted nothing. Fecondo also failed to file her 2015 and 2016 personal income tax returns even though she knew that she was required by law to file a tax return for each of those years. Further, Fecondo failed to file corporate tax returns on behalf of JSSI for tax years 2015 and 2016. “We’re in the middle of tax season, when a lot of people are grumbling about what they owe the IRS — but they still go ahead and pay what they’re supposed to.” said U.S. Attorney Romero. “It’s these honest taxpayers who are being robbed when people try to cheat the system. Donna Fecondo was obligated to properly remit payroll taxes to the government and file personal and business returns annually, but simply decided not to. Her nearly four-year prison sentence should send a loud message to anyone even contemplating tax fraud that it will wind up costing them dearly, in the end.” “Payroll taxes are an integral source of funding for government programs such as Social Security and Medicare,” said Yury Kruty, IRS Criminal Investigation (CI) Special Agent in Charge. “Employment tax fraud will continue to be a priority for IRS CI and we will aggressively pursue those who do not comply with their employment tax obligations.” The case was investigated by the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation and prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Karen Grigsby. 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.
