Bothell contractor pleads guilty to theft of sales tax, filing false tax returns

Published 2:59 pm Wednesday, March 20, 2013

A Bothell contracting corporation pled guilty today with stealing nearly $23,000 in sales tax between 2004 and 2010 and covering up the theft by filing fraudulent tax returns.

Snohomish County Superior Court Judge George N. Bowden accepted the guilty plea from Let Me Paint It, Inc., a corporation operated by Timothy S. Strash and Tracy L. Kemp-Strash.

Bowden imposed a $500 victim penalty assessment in addition to the nearly $150,000 in restitution the corporation has already made to cover the charged thefts and other unpaid taxes, penalties and interest.

The charges were filed by the Attorney General’s Office at the request of the Washington State Department of Revenue.

According to charging papers, the company claimed it had conducted no business from 2004 through 2010, but an audit found that it actually had done nearly $291,000 in work on which it had collected but not remitted sales tax.