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Restaurant Owner Charged with Sales Suppression

ST. PAUL, Minn. – The Minnesota Department of Revenue announced that the St. Louis County Attorney’s Office recently charged Zhong Wei Lin, Dan Xu, Su Ling Cao, and Osaka Duluth, Inc. with two counts each of aiding in the filing of false tax returns. The St. Louis County Attorney’s Office also charged Zhong Wei Lin and Osaka Duluth, Inc. with 15 additional counts of failing to pay sales tax.

According to the complaint, Xu, Lin, and Cao intentionally used sales suppression software to remove thousands of line items from sales receipts in order to underreport their monthly sales and file at least 15 false sales tax returns in 2015 and 2016. Through their actions, the defendants and Osaka Sushi Hibachi Steak House allegedly deprived the state of more than $27,000 in sales tax revenue and the city of Duluth of more than $7,800 in local sales tax revenue.

Although charges were filed for 15 months beginning in February 2015 through August 2016, the complaint indicates that investigators found evidence that the defendants’ use of the sales suppression software dated back 35 months. The fraudulent activity allegedly cost the state and the city of Duluth more than $125,000 in total lost tax revenue during that period.

Read the full new release here.

Chicago Restaurant Owner Charged With Tax Evasion For Defrauding The State

Chicago, IL – Attorney General Lisa Madigan today announced that an owner of a Chicago restaurant was charged with under-reporting more than $1 million in sales.

Sandra Sanchez, 43, of Morton Grove, was charged in Cook County with theft and tax evasion for defrauding the state out of more than $100,000. As an owner of Cesar’s Restaurant located at 3166 N. Clark St., Madigan alleged Sanchez used an automated sales suppression device to underreport more than $1 million in sales to the Illinois Department of Revenue (IDOR).

Madigan alleged that between January 2012 and October 2015, Sanchez used a so-called “zapper” or sales suppression software to falsify electronic sales records to avoid paying the full amount of sales and use taxes to the state each month.

Read the full news release here.

 

Holding back on sales tax?

Businesses  have been cheating, ahem…I mean suppressing, the amount due on sales tax for ages.  Traditional methods of suppression include removing cash out of the till, not ringing up cash transactions and under-reporting of sales.   In the digital age, software has supplemented most of these traditional methods.  Using software to reduce tax liability is called “zapping”.   Zapping can be done using software that is included with point-of-sale systems, using plug-in devices, or by using cloud-based “suppression as a service” providers.

It has been estimated that states are losing $1 billion in sales tax annually from cash-intensive businesses.  XDS can help your state solve this problem.   Contact us soon to find out how.  In the meantime, here are some links that will help you get familiar with this costly topic:

Everett Software Salesman Pleads Guilty to Selling ‘Tax Zapper’ Software to Enable Cheating on State and Federal Taxes

NY’s sales-tax losses don’t register

Zappers – Technological Tax Fraud in New Hampshire

Pennsylvania’s Sales and Use Tax: Has Nearly $1 Billion Been “Zapped” Away in Fraud?

CALIFORNIA TAXES: ‘Zapper’ software for retail tax evasion an emerging concern

Software Salesman Sentenced to Prison for Selling ‘Tax Zapper’ Software

An Everett, Washington man who worked for a Canadian company that sells point of sale computer software, was sentenced today in U.S. District Court in Seattle to 18 months in prison and three years of supervised release for his role in a scheme to sell ‘Tax Zapper’ software,  announced U.S. Attorney Annette L. Hayes. JOHN YIN, 66, pleaded guilty in December 2016, to wire fraud and conspiracy to defraud the government admitting that he promoted and sold a revenue suppression software that allowed restaurants to under-report their sales and illegally lower their tax bills. The software – sometimes called a “Zapper” program – resulted in a loss amount of more than $3.4 million. At the sentencing hearing U.S. District Judge Richard A. Jones said YIN served as a facilitator for illegal operations. “This was illegal, this was criminal and you had to know you have to pay taxes… but you continued – motivated by greed.”

Read the full article here.

Is buying external data worth the cost?

External data is only worth the cost if the value you get from the data is more than the purchase price.   With that said, the right external data can make a big difference!  One great tax example is “Use Tax”.  If you can buy external data with company information like square footage, inventory size, credit score, and employee count then estimating Use Tax using a predictive model becomes much easier.   One of our clients increased the predictive capability of the Use Tax models by 10%.   That may not sound like much, but if you are going from 75% to 85% confidence in a predictive model, it is huge!

If you are on the Personal Income Tax side of the organization, we suggest you purchase IP information.  IP data contains a lot more than just the IP address.  It includes the name and location of the service provider (country,  region, state, and city).   IP information is really useful in creating fraud models but most organizations don’t purchase it on a regular basis.  If you buy IP data, we recommend getting a subscription that updates your files on a regular basis.

Whether you are buying business  or IP data, the “magic” happens when the external data is “matched” to your internal data.   Be warned, however,  if you buy external data and can’t match it to the data you have, it becomes instantly useless.   So be sure that you have data matching software available BEFORE you buy, or have access to some data professionals that can match it for you.

When you contact XDS, be sure to ask us about our experience with using external data.  We are experts at finding it and making it work in your environment.

Tax Zapper Legislation

Washington D.C. – National Conference of State Legislatures

Forty-six states and the District of Columbia levy a sales tax at the state and/or local level. A device called a “tax zapper,” however, may mean these jurisdictions are being short-changed. Automated sales suppression devices, or zappers, have proliferated with the computerization of cash registers and have given retailers the ability to cheat state and local tax departments out of owed sales taxes through the falsification of electronic records of point of sale (POS) systems (modern cash registers).

Zapper software is stored on a portable USB device that can quickly and easily be linked to the cash register system. At the end of the day, the software systematically modifies the machine’s records to reduce the value of the day’s sales. For instance, a $5 receipt may become $4.50 or a $3 purchase may be erased altogether. For every dollar in sales a store deletes from its records, the owner gets to keep the extra cents that would otherwise be sent to a state and local government as sales tax. While it’s only pennies at a time, after enough transactions, the money adds up.

Read the full article here.

NY’s sales-tax losses don’t register

New York could learn a thing or two from California. The lesson could make Albany richer by billions of dollars.

I’m talking about a sales-tax enforcement effort that started in the Golden State just two weeks ago. It aims to outlaw “zappers,” which are high-tech cash registers that allow stores, restaurants and other businesses to make transactions — and the tax owed on those sales — disappear.

Jerome Horton, a top tax official in California, said, “Unfortunately, sometimes the criminals are one step ahead of us in the use of technology.”

Read the full article here.

California Taxes: ‘Zapper’ software for retail tax evasion an emerging concern

There’s a new kind of tax cheat in California.

Unscrupulous retailers are using “zapper” software that lets them remove cash transactions from their receipts to avoid paying taxes, costing the state an estimated $210 million annually.

“Unfortunately, sometimes the criminals are one step ahead of us in the use of technology,” Riverside County District Attorney Paul Zellerbach said at a Wednesday, Jan. 8, news conference that included state Board of Equalization Chairman Jerome E. Horton.

“Not since the days of Al Capone” has tax evasion been so pervasive, said Horton, who said California loses an estimated $8.5 billion in tax revenue annually to all kinds of illegal tax dodges, part of those spawned by a growing “underground economy,” he said.

Read the full news article here.

Pennsylvania’s Sales and Use Tax: Has Nearly $1 Billion Been “ZAPPED” Away In Fraud?

The Sales and Use Tax is an essential part of Pennsylvania’s revenue profile. Not only is it the State’s second largest revenue source, it has historically played a critical role in reducing the volatility of Pennsylvania’s overall tax collections. The sales tax is also critical to the city of Philadelphia, and Allegheny County. During the current economic downturn both the revenue and structural attributes of this levy should be pushing it to the front of the tax policy line.

In short, the observation is – if revenue is going to be hard to come by for a period of time, then at least it needs to be dependable. In Pennsylvania, dependable revenue means sales and use tax revenue. It would also be helpful if revenue could be found that did not involve a rate increase or a tax base expansion.

As a result, the two topics that should rest atop Pennsylvania’s tax policy agenda should be: (1) joining the Streamlined Sales Tax initiative and (2) stemming revenue losses from automated sales suppression software (Zappers). The first initiative would yield additional revenue of $220 – $384 million (from e-commerce alone); the second effort (based on the author’s estimates) would yield additional $922 million in revenue (in the restaurant industry alone). One of the more attractive aspects of both of these efforts is that neither involves changing rates. Both provide additional revenue primarily by improving enforcement.

Read the full paper here.

Zappers – Technological Tax Fraud in New Hampshire

No other State is as vulnerable to Zappers as is the State of New Hampshire. Zappers and related software programming, Phantom-ware, facilitate an old tax fraud – skimming cash receipts. In this instance skimming is performed with modern electronic cash registers (ECRs). Zappers are a global revenue problem, but to the best of this author’s knowledge they have not been uncovered in New Hampshire. Seen from a global perspective however, it seems unlikely that they are not here.

New Hampshire’s fiscal vulnerability to Zappers comes from its heavy reliance on precisely the industry segment that has been found to be the “hot bed” of this fraud – the restaurant industry. In the most recent fiscal year the Meals and Room Tax (M&RT) trailed only the Business Profits Tax (BPT) in revenue yield ($206,726 to $317,439 million). Taxes on meals approximate 70% of the M&RT. As a result, when tax fraud arises in this industry segment it is a significant concern.

Read the full paper here.