A Florida man pleaded guilty in federal court in Miami to not paying employment taxes and not filing his individual income tax returns. According to court documents, Paul Walczak, of Palm Beach Gardens, controlled a web of interconnected healthcare companies operating under various names, including Palm Health Partners and Palm Health Partners Employment Services (PHPES). At its peak, PHPES employed over 600 people and paid over $24 million dollars annually in payroll. From 2016 through 2019, Walczak withheld nearly $7.5 million in taxes from his employees’ paychecks but did not pay over those taxes to the IRS as required by law. He did this despite having been penalized by the IRS in 2014 for not paying his employees’ taxes.
During this same period, Walczak also did not pay $3,480,111 of the business’s portion of his employees’ Social Security and Medicare taxes. At the same time Walczak was withholding taxes from his employees’ wages and not paying them to the IRS, he used over $1 million from his businesses’ bank accounts to purchase a yacht, transferred hundreds of thousands of dollars to his personal bank accounts and used the business accounts for personal spending at retailers such as Bergdorf Goodman, Cartier and Saks Fifth Avenue. For 2019 through 2020, Walczak did not file personal income tax returns despite being legally required to do so. In total, Walczak caused a tax loss to the IRS of $10,912,334.80.
