HARRISBURG, Pa. — The owner of a Harrisburg temp agency will serve six months in prison and was ordered to pay nearly $2 million in restitution for failing to collect and pay four years' worth of employment taxes, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Middle District of Pennsylvania said Wednesday.
Dary T. Son, 37, of Harrisburg, failed to collect and pay the Internal Revenue Service nearly $592,000 in taxes on her employees' behalf between 2015 and 2019, according to U.S. Attorney Gerard M. Karam.
Son is the owner of DS Agency, a temporary staffing company, Karam said.
She also failed to pay to the IRS an equivalent amount that she owed as their employer, Karam said.
Dary Son is the younger sister of Vanny Son, who was previously prosecuted for conspiring to defraud the United States through the evasion of employment taxes for his temporary employment agencies for tax years 2007 through 2012, according to Karam.
Before Vanny Son reported to prison in 2015, his wife took over the operation of his employment agency, Son Associates. They later divorced in 2017, Karam said.
Beginning in 2015, Son Associates began, on paper, subcontracting its labor leasing business to other companies controlled by family members of Vanny Son and his then-wife, including DS Agency, LLC, of which Dary Son was the sole member and responsible person for purposes of the IRS, according to Karam.
From 2015 to 2019, DS Agency received and cashed checks from Son Associates for providing workers in the total amount of over $7.7 million. Rather than depositing these payments in a bank account, Dary Son cashed these checks at a check cashing business in Harrisburg from 2015 to mid-2017, Karam claims.
Starting in 2018, Vanny Son’s now ex-wife and Dary Son regularly made trips to a check cashing business in Philadelphia, where Dary Son cashed about $3 million in checks in less than a year, Karam said.
The workers employed by Dary Son and her family member’s companies worked regularly at several food manufacturing facilities in and around the Middle District of Pennsylvania, according to Karam.
A number of them were transported to their work sites by Dary Son, and they were generally paid in cash by Vanny Son’s ex-wife, Karam alleges. The ex-wife passed away in 2021, when the investigation remained ongoing and before any charges were filed in this case.
Dary Son never withheld any federal, Social Security, Medicare, or state taxes from her employees’ income, according to Karam. She likewise did not pay her employer portion of these taxes, Karam alleges.
As a result, Karam said, she was responsible for $1,183,646.25 in unpaid federal taxes.
Son was ordered to pay this amount in restitution to the IRS.
The case was investigated by the IRS Criminal Investigations Division. Assistant U.S. Attorney Ravi Romel Sharma prosecuted the case.
