A former Denver attorney who pleaded guilty to charges of conspiring to defraud the Internal Revenue Service was sentenced earlier this week to 18 months in federal prison for costing the government between $2.5 million and $7 million in lost tax revenue.
Eva Melissa Sugar, 61, of Aurora, was also ordered to serve three years on supervised release and ordered to pay a fine of $5,000, the Colorado U.S. attorney’s office said in a news release Thursday.
Sugar used various schemes to avoid tax-reporting mandates, including transferring ownership of most or all assets belonging to a taxpayer or their business to trusts and treating payments to the same trusts as business deductions, the office said.
Financial Fortress Associates, which promoted the use of so-called Constitutional Pure Trust Organizations as part of the defrauding schemes, referred clients from throughout the nation to Sugar starting about 1999.
Sugar, who had more than 150 clients, was indicted in May 2013 along with two co-defendants who were her clients, a Florida man and a Tennessee man.
The case was investigated by the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation.
