A Utah film producer has been sentenced to six years for tax evasion and other crimes.
The man, Paul Kenneth Cromar, was also sentenced for attempting to retake land and property seized by a court order.
IRS Criminal Investigation’s Phoenix Field Office and the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) jointly investigated the case. Cromar had been evading the clutches of law enforcement, and the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) had been seeking his arrest since August 2022 for a criminal matter.
Utah film producer sentenced for tax evasion
The Justice Department reported that the accused owned a home in Cedar Hills and operated Blue Moon Productions LLC, a freelance film and media production company.
He did not officially file any form of tax returns or pay tax, which was discovered as part of a 2005 investigation carried out by the IRS. The financial regulator issued Cromar a bill for “$703,266.96 in taxes, interest, and penalties. For more than a decade thereafter, Cromar did not make any payments towards his outstanding debt and took steps to obstruct the IRS’s ability to collect his delinquent taxes,” said the evidence presented at trial.
Cromar’s home was put up for auction in 2019 due to his non-payment of the staggering tax bill, which was estimated to be in the region of $1 million in 2019.
According to the information reported by the Justice Department, Cromar then “attempted to stop the sale by filing false documents on the property’s title and with the IRS, including a false promissory note. He also attempted to intimidate potential purchasers of the home and harassed IRS personnel by filing frivolous lawsuits against them personally.”
Cromar then would occupy the property forcibly with a group of collaborators before the property sale was complete. According to the court report “he occupied the home unlawfully for five months, fortifying it with firearms, sandbags and wooden boards tactically placed throughout the house.”
In addition to his six-year sentence, Cromar will be subject to three years of supervised release and to pay approximately $723,028.65 in restitution to the United States as a condition of his supervised release.
Image: Pexels.
