In a decisive ruling, Christianne Mylott-Coleman, a former aide to ex-State Senator Dean Tran, has been handed a sentence of 30 days behind bars and a year of supervised release for tax evasion. U.S. District Court Judge Mark G. Mastroianni laid down the law on Wednesday in Springfield, Mass, also confining Mylott-Coleman to a 90-day stint of home detention and slapping her with a bill for $269,209 in restitution she owes to Uncle Sam.
Caught red-handed, Mylott-Coleman had to publicly admit last November to cooking the books on her tax returns between 2016 and 2020, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office. Her fraudulent actions were not just a slap-dash affair, but a calculated omission of roughly $740,000 in cold-hard cash she pocketed from a home healthcare business aimed to serve the elderly – operations that ranged from dishing out pills to dishing up meals.
The former chief of staff to Senator Tran, who earned her wages between 2018 and 2020, played a balancing act, trying to juggle income from varied sources. She cashed in checks from healthcare service providers while simultaneously misreporting her own company's revenue, the financial truths slipping through the cracks unreported to the Internal Revenue Service.
Acting U.S. Attorney Joshua S. Levy, alongside Harry Chavis, Jr., the top dog at the IRS Criminal Investigation's Boston Field Office, unveiled the sentencing yesterday. The case was a group effort, with Assistant U.S. Attorneys Dustin Chao and John T. Mulcahy from the Criminal Division strenuously working to untangle Mylott-Coleman's web of deceit and to hold her accountable to face the music.
