The former owner of bankrupt Milford temp-employment agency Infinistaff LLC will spend 37 months in federal prison for promoting a bankruptcy and tax-fraud scheme that cheated employees and the IRS out of nearly $4 million in unpaid payroll and employment taxes, authorities say.
Jason Sheehan, 41, of New Haven, was sentenced in Hartford federal court Monday on one count of willful failure to collect, account for and pay tax; one count of embezzlement from a bankruptcy estate; and one count of making a false declaration in a bankruptcy, the Connecticut U.S. Attorney’s office said.
U.S. District Judge Alvin Thompson also sentenced Sheehan’s wife, Glorvina Constant, 36, to one year of probation for conspiracy to commit bank fraud for her involvement in a related mortgage scheme, federal prosecutors said.
According to court papers and testimony, in September 2010, Infinistaff, which at one time had an office in Enfield, filed a voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition with the Connecticut bankruptcy court.
As part of the bankruptcy case, Sheehan filed operating reports that falsely claimed that another company was being paid to process Infinistaff’s payroll checks and to prepare and file its payroll tax returns and tax payments, investigators said.
Sheehan’s payroll-tax shell game siphoned off more than $2.5 million in employment taxes collected from workers’ paychecks from 2011 to 2013 but not remitted to the IRS, resulting in Infinistaff failing to pay about $1.4 million in employer payroll taxes, prosecutors said.
Meantime, Sheehan and Constant used the stolen money to support a lavish lifestyle, including purchasing a $650,000 home in Constant’s name.
In 2013, investigators said, Constant bought a home with a bank mortgage she obtained by falsely claiming she was an Infinistaff employee, earning about $16,000 a month. She made the same false job claim on her application for a second mortgage with the same lender. But by that time, Infinistaff was already in bankruptcy and no longer in business.
