The owner of Orange County-based temporary staffing companies pleaded guilty on Sept. 5 to one count of tax evasion and one count of aiding and assisting in the preparation of a false tax return, the US Department of Justice reported.

According to the US Attorney’s Office for Central District of California, the federal criminal charges claim Luis E. Perez willfully evaded paying the IRS nearly $30 million in taxes, penalties and interest, assessed against him. Perez also caused a false tax return to be filed with the IRS as part of efforts to conceal nearly $30 million in additional tax liabilities incurred by his staffing companies.

A sentencing hearing is scheduled for Jan. 16, 2025, at which time he will face a statutory maximum sentence of eight years in federal prison.

According to his plea agreement, Perez’s companies — Checkmates Staffing, Staffaide, BaronHR, BaronHR West and Fortress Holding Group — failed to pay the IRS payroll taxes for seven tax years from May 2009 to January 2017, including trust fund taxes that Perez’s companies withheld from employees’ paychecks.

Perez attempted to avoid the IRS’s collection efforts by purchasing luxury items from his business bank accounts — including cars and a boat — and concealing his ownership by placing the titles of these items in the names of his businesses and other individuals, according to the DOJ. He also allegedly evaded the IRS’s collection efforts by obtaining a Visa Black credit card in the name of another person to make personal purchases and paid off the credit card using funds from his business bank accounts. 

“For nearly a decade, Mr. Perez committed tax evasion by withholding millions of dollars in payroll taxes from employee paychecks and using that money to purchase luxury items for himself,” said Acting Special Agent in Charge Jose Gonzalez, IRS Criminal Investigation, Los Angeles Field Office. “As a business owner, he had a duty to his employees and to the IRS, yet despite attempts by the IRS to work with Mr. Perez, he lied and continued to report false information.” 

Perez has been in federal custody since Aug. 15, when a federal magistrate judge revoked his bond after a two-day evidentiary hearing finding probable cause to believe that Perez had violated the terms of his pretrial release by committing still more criminal tax violations between 2021 and 2023. In a motion to revoke Perez’s bond filed with the court on Aug. 2, the government alleged that Perez had willfully caused his staffing companies to fail to pay over $25 million in federal payroll taxes (including over $13 million in federal trust fund taxes withheld from employee wages) since March 2021.