Owner of construction companies sentenced to prison for tax and mail fraud

Date: Jan. 13, 2025

Contact: [email protected]

BOSTON - A Hopkinton man was sentenced on Jan. 10, 2025, in federal court in Boston for defrauding the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Travelers Insurance Company in relation to wages he paid to employees of his two construction companies.

Dariusz Pietron was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani to serve 18 months in prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release. Pietron was also ordered to pay restitution of $1,107,000 to the IRS and $244,000 to the Travelers Insurance Company. In May 2024, Pietron pleaded guilty to three counts of failure to collect and pay over employment taxes to the IRS and one count of mail fraud relating to underpaid workers' compensation insurance premiums.

Between 2012 and October 2018, Pietron owned and operated TJM Construction, Inc. (TJM) and Point Construction, Inc. (Point). Pietron failed to report to the IRS the wages he paid to employees, failed to withhold required income taxes and failed to pay required employment taxes. Pietron also failed to disclose to Travelers Insurance Company the actual wages he paid to employees, which resulted in him paying less in workers' compensation insurance premiums than he owed. As part of the scheme, Pietron recruited and paid two employees to establish three shell companies - companies that would make it appear as if TJM and Point's employees were subcontractors to whom Pietron had no tax or workers' compensation obligations. Pietron thereby failed to pay more than $1.1 million in employment taxes and defrauded Travelers of approximately $244,000.

United States Attorney Joshua S. Levy; Tom Demeo, Acting Special Agent in Charge of the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI), Boston Field Office; and Katherine Mulligan, Chief of Investigations for the Insurance Fraud Bureau of Massachusetts made the announcement today. Assistant United States Attorney Victor A. Wild of the Securities, Financial & Cyber Fraud Unit prosecuted the case.

IRS-CI is the criminal investigative arm of the IRS, responsible for conducting financial crime investigations, including tax fraud, narcotics trafficking, money-laundering, public corruption, healthcare fraud, identity theft and more. IRS-CI special agents are the only federal law enforcement agents with investigative jurisdiction over violations of the Internal Revenue Code, obtaining a more than a 90 percent federal conviction rate. The agency has 20 field offices located across the U.S. and 12 attaché posts abroad.