Wisconsin man pleads guilty to failing to pay employment taxes

Date: Jan. 13, 2025

Contact: [email protected]

United States Attorney Gregory J. Haanstad announced that on Jan. 8, 2025, Senior United States District Judge William C. Griesbach accepted the guilty plea of Douglas Larson to one count of failure to truthfully account for and pay over employment taxes to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), in violation of 26 U.S.C. § 7202.

On Nov. 15, 2024, a one-count information was filed alleging that Larson had failed to pay over employment taxes for each quarter from January 2018 through September 2021. During that time period, Larson failed to pay over approximately $396,082.77 in employment taxes that he withheld from his employees' paychecks. According to the plea agreement, Larson was the owner and operator of Mods International, later known as Mods Client Services (Mods), which manufactured and installed residential and commercial buildings out of shipping containers.

In addition to the tax loss alleged in the information, the parties agreed in the plea agreement that Mods (and a related company owned and operated by Larson) failed to pay over employment taxes they withheld as well as employment taxes they owed before and after time period described above. The total tax loss agreed to in the plea agreement was $1,102,805.13.

Sentencing is scheduled for April 4, 2025, at 10:30 a.m., before Judge Griesbach. At sentencing, Larson faces up to five years in prison and up to a $250,000 fine. He also faces up to three years of supervised release after completing any period of imprisonment.

The IRS Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI), investigated the case, which Assistant United States Attorney Zachary J. Corey is prosecuting.

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.