Eric DePriest, 47, of Marshall was sentenced Monday to two years in federal prison and was ordered to pay $284,736.30 in restitution for failing to submit payroll taxes to the IRS.
DePriest is a co-owner of ZacBac Apparel LLC, a company that manufactures clothing for government agencies such as the U.S. Postal Service and the military. It was formed in 2002 and is headquartered in the Searcy County town of about 1,300.
According to a news release from U.S. Attorney Dak Kees of the Western District of Arkansas, DePriest was responsible for collecting, truthfully accounting for and submitting ZacBac's payroll taxes from March 2009 through Dec. 31, 2015.
Between July 2012 and September 2015, the company withheld more than $293,000 in trust fund taxes from employees' wages and failed to pay $284,736.30 to the government, Kees said. He said that during the same period, ZacBac diverted more than $247,000 of the trust fund taxes collected from employees' wages.
Specifically, during the quarter that ended Dec. 31, 2014, DePriest deducted and collected $24,701.25 from the taxable wages of ZacBac employees that he didn't pay into the treasury of the United States, according to the news release.
He was indicted by a federal grand jury in September 2018 and pleaded guilty in February before U.S. District Judge P.K. Holmes III, who imposed the sentence Monday.
The investigation was conducted by the IRS Criminal Investigations Division and was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Kyra Jenner.
Metro on 07/06/2019