Hillsboro businessman convicted of tax evasion

By Brent Weisberg
Published: September 30, 2014, 8:05 am

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN 6) – A 53-year-old man was ordered by a federal judge to pay the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) close to $500,000 and spend a year and a half in federal prison after pleading guilty to federal tax evasion.

Stephen Gregory Nagy was the former president of Hillsboro-based S&S Drywall Assemblies. According to the United States Attorney’s Office, Nagy’s company produced drywall services from January 2005 through September 2011.

The IRS assessed the company $481,519 in federal employment taxes, penalties and interest for between June 2009 and September 2010. Nagy met with the IRS and committed to a plan to pay the past due payroll taxes for his company, but investigators said he decided not to comply with the payment play and engaged “in a variety of interrelated fraudulent schemes to evade the payment of the delinquent payroll taxes.”

Investigators learned that he started conducting extensive business transactions in order to hide funds from the IRS. He obtained cash by illegally hiring undocumented workers to work on prevailing wage jobs, paying them a small portion of the prevailing hourly rate and demanding that they kick back the largest part of their wages to him in cash, court documents state. Nagy failed to report the case to the IRS.

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Seattle contractor who threatened workers with deportation to steal wages sentenced

A Seattle contractor who’d landed more than $1.1 million in government contracts was sentenced Friday to three months in jail for scamming workers out of pay as part of a scheme to underbid his competitors.

Dathan Williams’ thefts from his workers were uncovered following an intensive investigation that saw a Seattle police officer trained as a drywall installer and inserted into his company. Williams, 33, bragged about threatening his employees with deportation when they asked to be paid correctly.

Williams, 33, appears to have been targeted as part of a larger investigation into claims that Washington subcontractors are abusing workers and ignoring wage laws meant to keep opportunistic contractors from underbidding those paying higher wages.

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