McCandless cleaning firm owner gets prison for tax evasion

A McCandless businessman will spend two years in prison for tax evasion.

U.S. District Judge Cathy Bissoon imposed that term Tuesday on Mark Stanford. She also ordered him to pay $339,000 in restitution and a $4,000 fine.

Stanford, owner of YClean on Route 19, pleaded guilty in May to two counts of tax evasion.

Prosecutors said he evaded payment of his personal income taxes and the portions of Social Security and Medicare taxes for employees that he should have paid as an employer from 2009 through 2013.

Federal agents determined that Stanford made personal expenditures instead of paying the taxes he knew were due. He also filed a false document about his finances with the IRS in which he didn’t list two Bentley cars among his assets, as well as a bank account he opened in his son’s name that he used to move money from his business to pay himself in cash.

Stanford, who according to prosecutors has a history of writing bad checks and a prior federal conviction for bank fraud, asked for a downward variance in his sentence.

He said he never intended to evade taxes.

“I always intended to pay the IRS, as my financial ability improved,” he said. “Most times, I found myself having to make the choice of paying the taxes or making payroll and keeping my business going.”

But Assistant U.S. Attorney James Wilson said that claim didn’t square with his actions.

Mr. Wilson said Stanford repeatedly told the judge that his intention to make payroll and other business expenses caused him not to pay his taxes, but he never addresses his “self-indulgent consumerism” such as buying the Bentleys for himself.

Mr. Wilson also said that in December 2013, at a time when Stanford was in default on an installment agreement to pay the IRS, he moved into a new $1.3 million house. He said it’s no crime to buy a new house, take vacations or purchase high-end cars.

“But what he cannot do is deliberately shirk his tax obligations and then beseech this court for leniency based on a variety of expressed but unfulfilled good intentions and supposed insurmountable hurdles, when his own conduct repeatedly belies those expressed intentions and the existence of the hurdles.”

In addition to the prison term, the judge ordered Stanford to be on probation for three years.