A Utah man has been sentenced to an aggregate of six years in prison for tax evasion and forcibly retaking a house and land seized under a court order to pay his outstanding tax debt.
According to court documents and evidence presented at trial, Paul Kenneth Cromar, formerly of Cedar Hills, Utah, owned a home in Cedar Hills and operated Blue Moon Productions LLC, a freelance film and media production company.
From 1999 through 2005, Cromar did not file any federal income tax returns or pay any tax.
In 2005, the IRS conducted an audit and assessed him with $703,266.96 in taxes, interest and penalties.
For more than a decade thereafter, Cromar did not make any payments towards his outstanding debt and took steps to obstruct the IRS’s ability to collect his delinquent taxes.
In 2019, due to this course of conduct, a federal judge ordered that Cromar’s home be sold at auction to satisfy his tax obligations, which by then had ballooned to over $1 million.
Cromar then attempted to stop the sale by filing false documents on the property’s title and with the IRS, including a false promissory note.
He also attempted to intimidate potential purchasers of the home and harassed IRS personnel by filing frivolous lawsuits against them personally. Â Â
Shortly before the sale closed, Cromar broke into the home and attempted to reclaim it. With the help of others, he occupied the home unlawfully for five months, fortifying it with firearms, sandbags and wooden boards tactically placed throughout the house.
In addition to his prison sentence, U.S. District Judge Howard C. Nielson Jr. for the District of Utah ordered Cromar to serve three years of supervised release and to pay approximately $723,028.65 in restitution to the United States as a condition of his supervised release.