While finance executives involved in big white-collar crime cases make headlines, the Internal Revenue Service remains vigilant about tracking perpetrators of small-business crime. Case in point: Jeffrey Meyer, a one-time chief financial officer of a very small, defunct Illinois company has been charged with filing a false income-tax return, specifically for not reporting embezzled income.
Meyer was charged with stealing nearly $174,000 from Cargo Inc., a freight-forwarding company, shortly before it went out of business in 2002, according to The Daily Herald, a suburban Chicago newspaper. Reportedly, Meyer was accused of embezzling the sum through unauthorized Cargo payroll checks and improper personal use of a corporate credit card, the paper noted.
The thefts allegedly took place in 2000 and 2001. In April 2001, Meyer filed a tax return showing he earned $146,081 in the previous year, and “willfully omitted” $67,771 he gained from the improper use of the credit card and payroll checks, according to the report. Cargo abruptly shut its doors in May 2002, and more than 100 employees were not paid for their final two weeks or so of work, according to The Herald.
Daniel Chobot, who reportedly served as Cargo’s general counsel, told the paper that he had found the company’s books in “a shambles” when Meyer was fired. He said Meyer worked at Cargo for about 15 years. Cargo, a privately-held company founded in 1977, had an estimated $60 million in revenue in 2001, according to the report.