Ingram Tax Probe Results in Another Guilty Plea

Another Ingram Micro Inc. employee, one of 300 salespeople that the IRS had targeted for possible tax evasion, pleaded guilty Monday to charges stemming from her failure to report incentive pay.

Janice Hale of Huntington Beach is the 18th current or former employee to face criminal charges from the two-year investigation by the Internal Revenue Service into failures by employees to report bonuses as income.

The IRS is seeking back taxes, interest and hefty civil penalties from about 200 employees at Ingram’s Santa Ana headquarters and more than 100 at its Buffalo, N.Y., regional center, where the audits began in early 1995.

The investigation, which continues in Southern California, is one of the biggest tax cases involving employees at a single company. Only the most flagrant cases are being prosecuted criminally, prosecutors have said.

Hale pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles to charges of failing to file a tax return for 1994 and submitting a false statement to a bank for a $20,000 home improvement loan.

She earned $84,885 in 1994, part of it in incentive pay, and paid $8,777 in taxes through withholding. But she never filed a return and still owes an additional $10,646 in taxes, according to her plea agreement. She also admits lying on a loan application about the name of her supervisor, the agreement states.

Neither she nor her attorney could be reached for comment.

Hale is scheduled to be sentenced Feb. 9. She faces up to 31 years in prison, but none of the other Ingram salespeople has been imprisoned.

All of them, though, had initially filed returns and eventually paid the taxes owed, plus penalties and interest.

The Ingram cases focus on payments that manufacturers in various industries made to Ingram salespeople as part of product promotions. The bonuses, commonly called SPIFFS, came from special product incentive funds manufacturers set up separately at Ingram to disburse the bonuses.