Date: Feb. 10, 2025
Contact: [email protected]
Tampa, FL — United States Attorney Roger B. Handberg announces that Terence Taylor has pleaded guilty to obstructing and impeding the administration of the internal revenue laws for actions seeking to defeat the collection of back taxes he owed to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Taylor faces a maximum penalty of three years in federal prison.
According to the plea agreement, Taylor was sentenced in 2012 for failing to file his income taxes for several years while he lived in the Northern District of New York. He owed more than $810,000 in taxes and was required to pay the tax debt during the term of his sentence.
For more than seven years, continuing after he moved to the Middle District of Florida, Taylor engaged in a series of obstructive acts to defeat the efforts by the IRS to collect those taxes. During those years, Taylor hid assets from the IRS, placed other asserts and income in the names of alter egos or nominees such as his wife, and used money that he could have used to pay off his back taxes to make purchases of assets including boats, jewelry, and a home in Palm Harbor. Taylor continued to earn income from his work as a financial consultant during those years after 2012. He used that income for numerous personal purposes and expenses and only minimally paid his tax debt to the IRS during that time.
The IRS made extensive efforts to collect on Taylor’s tax debt between 2004 and 2008. Aside from contacting Taylor on numerous occasions, IRS Revenue Officers also sent him numerous forms for detailing his financial situation. Taylor submitted false or incomplete information on those forms, omitting to record assets he owned such as boats and providing false information about his business and its accounts and dates of operation. Instead of using it to repay his tax debt, Taylor used his business income and bank accounts after 2012 to pay for a large number of personal expenses, including marina and yacht club expenses, boat expenses, and jewelry purchases, while knowing of his tax debt to the IRS. In February 2017, Taylor used income that he had earned from his business to buy a $73,000 boat, which he then titled in his wife’s name in an effort to shield that asset from the IRS collection effort.
Taylor also failed to file personal income tax returns for several years after his New York sentence had ended. He did so, even though he was earning sufficient income requiring him to file tax returns.
This case was investigated by the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI). It is being prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Jay L. Hoffer.
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.