Owner and manager of Cape Coral roofing company plead guilty to tax fraud conspiracy

Date: Nov. 7, 2024

Contact: [email protected]

Fort Myers, FL - United States Attorney Roger B. Handberg announces that William Skaggs, Jr. and Billie Adkison today pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit tax fraud. Each faces a maximum penalty of five years in federal prison.

According to the plea agreement, Skaggs owned and operated Nastar Roofing, a Cape Coral based roofing company. Adkison served as the main office administrator for Nastar, and her duties included managing the company's payroll. Between 2013 and 2023, Nastar paid its employees predominantly in cash to avoid paying taxes they knew were owed to the federal government.

Typically, one or more Nastar employees, including Skaggs and Adkison, withdrew significant amounts of cash on Thursdays and Fridays to make Nastar's payroll at the end of the work week. Between 2013 and 2023, Nastar employees withdrew more than $21 million from the company's bank accounts to pay employees in cash. Skaggs and Adkison knew, and intentionally caused, Nastar to not withhold taxes from the cash payments to employees. Nastar also did not pay its own share of FICA taxes on these wages.

As part of their plea agreement, Skaggs and Adkison have agreed to make full restitution to the United States for the employment taxes Nastar avoided, including an upfront partial restitution payment of $1 million prior to their sentencing hearing, which has not yet been set.

This case was investigated by the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI). It is being prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Michael V. Leeman and Department of Justice Tax Division trial attorney Kevin Schneider.

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.