Vermont Business Magazine The Office of the United States Attorney for the District of Vermont stated that Blakely H Jenkins, Sr, 61, of St Johnsbury, Vermont, was sentenced today to one year and one day of imprisonment for evading taxes and committing identity theft while running his St. Johnsbury-based painting business, Blake Jenkins Painting, Inc. United States District Judge William K Sessions III also ordered Jenkins to serve a two-year term of supervised release.
In February 2022, Jenkins pleaded guilty to two counts of evasion of employment taxes and one count of identity theft.
According to court records and proceedings, Jenkins evaded employment taxes from mid-2015 to mid-2020 by paying his employees “off the books” wages either in cash or in checks falsely denoted as being for non-wage purposes.
Jenkins took a number of steps to execute this plan, including falsifying records, creating bogus documents, and signing another person’s name without permission.
Every employment tax return that Jenkins’ company submitted to the Internal Revenue Service during this period contained false information that significantly underreported the amounts that Jenkins actually paid his employees.
In total, Jenkins’ company failed to report over $1.3 million in employee wages, resulting in over $340,000 in unpaid federal taxes.
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