Spruce Pine Attorney Sentenced to 27 Months for Filing False Tax Returns
| U.S. Attorney’s Office April 15, 2014 |
CHARLOTTE, NC—U.S. District Judge Graham Mullen sentenced a Spruce Pine man, who was an attorney, engineer, and appraiser, to 27 months in prison for making false statements on his tax returns, announced Anne M. Tompkins, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of North Carolina. Randy Alan Carpenter, 56, was also ordered to serve one year under court supervision and to pay $507,995 as restitution to IRS.
Joining U.S. Attorney Tompkins in making today’s announcement are Jeannine A. Hammett, Special Agent in Charge of the Internal Revenue Service-Criminal Investigation Division (IRS-CI); John A Strong, Special Agent in Charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI); and Jon T. Rymer, Inspector General of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Office of the Inspector General (FDIC-OIG).
According to court records and today’s sentencing hearing, Carpenter received over $1.2 million in professional fees in 2005 and 2006 from his work at a failed real estate development near Spruce Pine, N.C., known as the “Villages of Penland.” Carpenter pleaded guilty to the tax charges in May 2013. As a condition of his plea agreement, Carpenter was also ordered to cooperate with the IRS in filing amended tax returns. When announcing his sentence, Judge Mullen noted that although Carpenter’s sentencing was not intentionally set for April 15, the court agreed with the prosecution’s argument that Carpenter’s sentence should be a general deterrent to those might be tempted to intentionally file false tax returns.
Carpenter will be ordered to report to the Federal Bureau of Prisons to begin serving his sentence upon designation of a federal facility. All federal sentences are served without the possibility of parole.
The investigation was handled jointly the FBI, IRS, and FDIC-OIG. The case is being prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorneys Michael E. Savage and Courtney Bumpers of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Charlotte and Trial Attorney Gregory Bailey of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Criminal Tax Division.