Chicago Illinois Sales Tax Fraud

Chicago Illinois Sales Tax Fraud
By:  Mansoor Ansari Attorney at Law
If you have been charged with sales tax fraud, contact our office and speak with a sales tax fraud attorney in Chicago.  Sales tax fraud is intentionally avoiding sales tax payment by destroying, concealing, or tampering with records.  House Bill 5289 increases the minimum penalty for sales tax fraud, allows prosecutors to charge business owners with tax fraud that has taken place over a longer period of time instead of month by month, and creates the crime of sales tax evasion.
A message from Lisa Madigan:
“SPRINGFIELD, IL – Assistant Majority Leader Jeff Schoenberg (D-Evanston) has advanced legislation, supported by Attorney General Lisa Madigan, to make sales tax scoff-laws easier to prosecute. The plan toughens criminal penalties for intentionally failing to remit money collected as sales tax and allows business owners to be prosecuted for sales tax evasion when they destroy, conceal, or falsify records.  When business owners collect sales tax on purchases but then refuse to remit those amounts to the state, they steal from their customers as well as depriving all Illinois residents of tax dollars that could be used for pressing statewide priorities,” Schoenberg said. “This legislation gives the Department of Revenue and the Attorney General new tools to bring the worst offenders to justice and deter sales tax evasion in the future.”
Attorney General Madigan’s office recently conducted a three-year investigation of gas stations and convenience stores to determine the prevalence of sales tax evasion. The Attorney General and the Illinois Department of Revenue found over 600 establishments that may have willfully withheld sales tax from the government and concluded that changes in the tax code were needed to strengthen enforcement efforts.
This legislation is aimed at those owners who are deliberately paying the government less than the amount they know they owe and who are destroying or altering records in an attempt to conceal their crime
The legislation has now been approved by both the House and Senate. It will return to the House for a concurrence vote before proceeding to the governor for his signature.  Gas stations file sales-tax returns each month. Under the law, prosecutors have to bring a separate charge for each month of misconduct — 12 counts if a station cheats each month for one year. That’s needlessly cumbersome. The charge for failing to produce books and records is only a misdemeanor.
A long-overdue fix is in the works, backed by Attorney General Lisa Madigan. It would make evasion of more than $100,000 in sales tax by any business a non-probational Class 1 felony. Prosecutors could aggregate the entire amount of sales tax that was under-reported month-by-month. The three-year statute of limitations for sales-tax fraud would expand to five years.
MANSOOR ANSARI J.D. LLM.
Chicago Illinois sales tax fraud