A Boston-area contractor has been slapped with charges for allegedly cooking the books on his company tax returns. Marcelo De Oliveira, 39, a former resident of Everett and head honcho of DeOliveira Carpentry, Inc., faces four counts of filing fraudulent tax documents with Uncle Sam.
Authorities claim De Oliveira schemed to conceal over $3.1 million in company earnings from 2017 to 2020. His method is cashing customer checks to keep them off the books and out of sight from the taxman. It's an age-old game of hide and seek with revenue that could now cost him dearly—up to three years behind bars, a year of supervised freedom, and a quarter-million-dollar fine for each count, to be exact.
Acting U.S. Attorney Joshua S. Levy and IRS Criminal Investigations' top Boston agent, Harry Chavis Jr., brought the charges to light yesterday. Kriss Basil of the Securities, Financial & Cyber Fraud Unit is leading the charge in prosecution—the legal eagles aiming to prove that playing fast and loose with taxes is a losing bet.
The alleged tax evasion might seem like a clever move, but if found guilty, De Oliveira will quickly find it to have been a costly mistake. While he may have attempted to shore up his business by circumventing the rules, the long arm of the law is set to ensure that this game of monetary hide-and-seek doesn't pay off. The suit against him, detailed at www.justice.gov, underscores this hard truth.
Yet, in the land where innocence prevails until guilt is proven, De Oliveira remains on the right side of the presumption of innocence. It's now up to the courts to sift through the evidence and determine whether he's a calculating tax evader or merely the latest to be ensnared by the complexities of tax law.
