[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Florida businessman Dusko Bruer pleaded guilty to tax evasion and failure to file a Report of Foreign Bank or Financial Account. Bruer owned a company that bought U.S. made agricultural machinery and parts and sold them throughout the world. From 2003 Bruer did not receive a salary, but he used millions of dollars from the company’s bank accounts to pay his personal expenses, including the purchase of a yacht for $1,350,000, a waterfront home in Florida for $1,650,000, a home for an employee and real property in Serbia.
From 2007 to 2011 Bruer transferred 5.8 million dollars of the company’s profits to foreign financial accounts in Croatia, Germany, Serbia and Switzerland. Between 2007 and 2014 Bruer failed to report more than 7.7 million dollars in income and did not pay taxes of more than 2.7 million dollars.
Bruer’s company never filed a corporate tax return and never paid any taxes. The company had a number of employees but never filed employment tax returns, and did not withhold and pay over payroll taxes.
From 1999 to 2014 Bruer didn’t file a personal tax return and didn’t pay any taxes on his income. In 2015 Credit Suisse closed his account in Switzerland, which at one point had a value of $6,177,586, and advised Bruer to enter the IRS’s Offshore Voluntary Disclosure Program, by which taxpayers could avoid criminal prosecution by making a voluntary disclosure to the IRS. Instead, Bruer filed a ‘quiet’ disclosure that involved filing several delinquent tax returns.
Bruer faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison for each charge, three years supervised release, restitution and monetary penalties.[/vc_column_text][us_image image=”1001″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
