2 Men Sentenced for Evading Taxes at Landscape Firm

Two Orange County men who ran a Huntington Beach landscaping company were sentenced Wednesday to federal prison for evading about $625,000 in payroll and unemployment taxes.

A U.S. District Court judge in Los Angeles sentenced Irvine resident Roger W. Borland, 44, the former president of Environments West Inc., to two years in prison for conspiracy, corporate tax evasion and falsifying his tax returns.

The company’s former vice president, Gregory J. Novosel, 46, of Dana Point, was sentenced to 15 months in prison for conspiracy and tax evasion, Assistant U.S. Atty. David C. Marcus said.

Both men pleaded guilty in April to charges that they had set up a sham company to conceal their company’s payments of wages and to avoid payroll taxes from 1989 to 1991.

Investigators calculated that both conspired to divert $1.7 million to the sham company, Coastal Pacific Services, disguising the money as payments to a subcontractor. Borland and Novosel then paid themselves and the other EWI employees $1.6 million through the Coastal account without reporting the payments to the Internal Revenue Service, Marcus said.