Another defendant in the federal income tax fraud case involving father-and-son car dealers James and Alan Pflueger has pleaded guilty.
Julie Ann Kam, Alan Pflueger’s executive assistant, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court on Friday to filing a false tax return for 2005 by failing to claim as income personal expenses paid by her employer, Pflueger Inc.
Kam’s 2005 tax return listed a total income of $47,398. The court record does not indicate how much income Kam failed to report.
In exchange for her guilty plea, the federal prosecutor promises to drop a conspiracy and similar charge involving Kam’s 2004 tax return.
Alan Pflueger pleaded guilty last week to failing to report as income money that Pflueger Inc. paid for his personal credit card, and utility and landscaping expenses for his residences.
Pflueger Inc. chief financial officer Randall Ken Kurata also pleaded guilty last week to having the company pay for Pflueger’s personal expenses and listing the payments as company deductions.
Kam was scheduled to stand trial with California certified public accountant Dennis Lawrence Duban next week. Duban will now stand trial for all the charges against him in September.
The charges against Duban include two conspiracy counts and helping Alan and James Pflueger prepare false income tax returns.
James Pflueger is scheduled to stand trial in February on charges that he sent $14 million from the sale of a California property to a Swiss bank account, then failed to report the money on his income tax return.
He is also scheduled to stand trial in state court next year for manslaughter in connection with the deaths of seven people who died when the Ka Loko Dam on Kauai’s North Shore breached, sending 400 million gallons of water downstream.
The prosecutor in the tax fraud case filed papers this week indicating that it just learned from a potential government witness that Duban prepared false income tax returns for two other Pflueger family members.
The government says Pflueger Inc. paid wages to Helen and Tracy Pflueger, the daughters of James Pflueger and sisters of Alan Pflueger, for performing no work in order to also pay their health insurance premiums. Duban then prepared the two women’s income tax returns claiming that the money the company paid them was nontaxable because they were either foreign earned income or health insurance payments made by someone who is self-employed, the government said.
Neither woman has been charged with any crimes.
