A Florida man, formerly of Hampden and Orrington, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to evading roughly $1 million in federal taxes by transferring assets in his bankruptcy case.
Paul Archer, 46, ran a profitable online marketing business for software installation on computers, earning several million dollars from 2013 through 2015, according to court records cited by the U.S. Department of Justice in a news release.
After an IRS audit in 2016, he was assessed a tax debt of roughly $1 million for those years. From April 2028 through November 2019, he hid and transferred assets through two LLCs he controlled and started using accounts under other company names, along with accounts in the name of his father and his spouse, to avoid paying the taxes he owed, the DOJ said.
He received income through direct deposits, sent and received more than $2 million in wire payments and used PayPal and the cryptocurrency exchanges Coinbase and Kraken to transfer and conceal assets and income through bank accounts held in the names of Max Tune Up, LLC and Stealth Kit, LLC, according to court records.
In March 2019, Archer filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, claiming to have less than $50,000 in assets, $20 in cash, $310.44 held in a single Katahdin Trust Co. bank account, no recent asset transfers, and no connections to any businesses or LLCs within the previous four years, according to court documents.
He later repeated those false claims during meetings of creditors and in statements to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Maine, the DOJ said.
Archer faces up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000 on each of the two charges.
