Spokane – Nov. 22, 2011 – The owner of Alpine Auto Wholesale in Spokane and her son were charged today with felony theft of sales tax and filing false state tax returns.
Linda Lee Reed, 68 and Marc Eugene Reed, 44, are accused of failing to remit at least $179,675.33 sales tax the business collected on retail vehicle sales in 2009 and 2010 by falsely reporting them as wholesale sales.
The charges were filed in Spokane County Superior Court by the Financial Crimes Unit of the Washington State Attorney General’s Office at the request of the Washington State Department of Revenue.
According to the charging papers, the Reeds admitted to state investigators that they knew that they should have remitted the collected sales tax to the Department of Revenue but were “going to get caught up later.”
The maximum penalty for the charges is 10 years in prison and a $20,000 fine.
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