Kansas City Business Owner Sentenced for Tax Crimes
A Kansas City metro business owner was sentenced on Monday for multiple employment tax crimes.
A 48-year-old man, Ephantus Mwangi, was sentenced to 51 months in prison for willfully failing to pay over employment taxes to the IRS for the company he owned and operated.
Mwangi was originally scheduled to be sentenced on April 27, but failed to appear in court. He was arrested six weeks later during a traffic stop. He gave officers a fake name and birth date during the stop.
According to court documents:
- Mwangi owned and operated True Payment Solutions, a Kansas-based business that sold credit-card processing services and card readers to merchants, along with True POS Solutions, Inc., a separate business offering similar services.
- He withheld $331,404.33 in taxes from his employees' wages that he did not pay over to the IRS.
- Mwangi also willfully failed to pay over employment taxes due from True Payment Solutions.
- Instead, from 2016 to 2019, he transferred over $1.5 million from the corporate bank accounts of the two businesses to his personal bank accounts.
- He spent over $200,000 on loan payments for various luxury vehicles, including a Hummer H2, a Cadillac Escalade, two Range Rovers, two Mercedes, and a Lexus.
- Mwangi used these funds to rent an 11,000 sq. ft. mansion as a second home in San Antonio, Texas, for $13,000 per month and to pay for private school tuition for his children.
- Between 2016 and 2019, he transferred a total of $763,000 in funds to "TRUE PAYMENT SOLUTIONS, EA LTD" in Kenya.
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