Date: May 30, 2024
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A suburban Chicago man has been sentenced to a year in federal prison for falsely overstating in personal tax returns the amount of his business expenses and charitable contributions.
A federal jury earlier this year convicted Nikko D'Ambrosio, of Des Plaines, Ill., of making false statements in his personal income tax returns for the tax years 2019 and 2020. D¡¯Ambrosio, who worked as a salesperson for an Illinois-based electronic sweepstakes kiosk operator, falsely claimed to have driven more than 474,000 miles on business-related travel for those two years. He also falsely claimed to have incurred more than $263,000 in business-related meal expenses during those years. D¡¯Ambrosio¡¯s false claims about his charitable contributions involved alleged donations of more than $63,000 to a Catholic church in Chicago. Financial and vehicle records presented at trial revealed that the mileage and meal expenses were vastly overstated, and a church representative testified that D¡¯Ambrosio was not a parishioner and that the church had no record of any donations by D¡¯Ambrosio in those years.
U.S. District Judge Thomas M. Durkin imposed the year-and-a-day sentence during a hearing Wednesday in federal court in Chicago.
The sentence was announced by Morris Pasqual, Acting United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, Jason Bushey, Acting Special Agent-in-Charge of IRS Criminal Investigation in Chicago, and Robert W. ¡°Wes¡± Wheeler, Jr., Special Agent-in-Charge of the Chicago Field Office of the FBI. The government was represented by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Richard M. Rothblatt and Brandon D. Stone.