In deposition, ex-employee charges Florida congressman with wide variety of misdeeds

Rep. Vern Buchanan, R-Sarasota, addresses the audience at a Bradenton town hall event (Pic via buchanan.house.gov)

In a deposition given on Jan. 9 and obtained by The Florida Independent, a former employee of Rep. Vern Buchanan, R-Sarasota, alleges that he reported Buchanan to the U.S. government in 2008 for tax evasion and conspiracy to evade U.S. income tax, and that he has been in contact with federal officials about Buchanan.

According to his deposition, which was taken under oath, Rosa first started working for Buchanan in 1998, when he was hired as CFO of Sarasota’s Buchanan Automotive Group. Rosa says in the deposition that he also acted as treasurer for many of Buchanan’s other organizations during the span of his employment.

But his tenure with Buchanan ended only five years later, in December 2003. And throughout “virtually the entire period” of his employment, according to Rosa, he was witness to “fraud and crime” that led him to request an IRS investigation into Buchanan.

The January deposition, which was given to the Independent by Duane Overholt, a consumer fraud advocate, was taken as part of a lawsuit filed by William Brooks (who owned a car dealership eventually bought by Buchanan’s company) against Mark Ornstein, Buchanan’s lawyer. Though Buchanan himself isn’t a party to the case, Rosa makes several references to Buchanan’s business dealings throughout the deposition.

“There was a fraud and crime that predated my employment and went on through virtually the entire period of my employment,” Rosa says in the deposition. “I’m going to reference to one incident, which was an evasion of U.S. income tax, also a conspiracy to evade U.S. income tax. I reported it to the federal government. I’ve received recent correspondence that the matter has not been terminated by the federal government. And this federal crime predates my employment and went on virtually the bulk of my employment with Buchanan.”

According to an email sent by Rosa to law enforcement officials in June 2011 (also given to us by Overholt), his former employer “described during the employment interview process what [Rosa] later came to understand (and also has confirmed through the review and concurrence of his two legal counsels) to be a scheme which Employer should have known to be a tax fraud, and that such scheme was implemented by Employer through a conspiracy to commit Federal income tax fraud.”

According to Rosa’s deposition, the scheme “continued and expanded in complexity, and the number of participants grew throughout the vast majority” of his employment with Buchanan.

Buchanan also “directed the preparation of blatantly false spreadsheet records regarding the business use of an aircraft to induce outside CPAs to include fraudulent income tax deductions in U.S. Individual Income Tax Returns, and Federal Forms 1040,” according to the email. According to Rosa, Buchanan “asserted this aircraft was operated under the FAA rules for ‘General Aviation,’” while it was actually being operated under regulations applicable to “Commercial Aviation.”

In his deposition, Rosa alleges that some of Buchanan’s entities were created “so that Vern could get a favorable tax treatment on his personal jet.”

According to the National Business Aviation Association, if someone were to fly a plane for a personal or business reason and file it instead as something they made money on (or vice versa) that person could run into trouble with both the IRS and the Federal Aviation Administration.

From a financial standpoint, those who use airplanes to generate revenue are taxed at a different rate than those who use them for personal reasons. From a safety standpoint, any company that falsifies how it categorizes its flights would be ignoring federal safety regulations. Per FAA rules, the closer a flight gets to a commercial airliner, the more mandates there are.

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