Illinois businessman gets 4 years for $8M payroll tax scheme

TROY, Ill. (AP) - A southern Illinois business owner has been sentenced to four years in prison for withholding more than $8 million in payroll taxes from employee paychecks to help 'œbuild his empire," federal authorities said.

Gary Hunsche was also sentenced Tuesday to 18 months of supervised release. He had pleaded guilty in May to willfully failing to pay millions of dollars in federal payroll taxes.

Hunsche, 56, was the owner-operator of Unique Personnel Consultants, a Troy-based staffing company with between 3,000 and 5,000 temporary workers who were outsourced to clients.

In pleading guilty, he acknowledged that between 2011 and 2016, he withheld federal income taxes, Medicare and Social Security taxes totaling $8 million from employees' paychecks without turning those funds over to the Internal Revenue Service, the Belleville News-Democrat reported.

Hunsche used at least $4 million of that money to expand his 'œpersonal empire'ť and pay for renovations to his home, including a pond and a barn with a full-sized basketball court, according to charging documents filed in the U.S. Court for the Southern District of Illinois.

'œThousands of employees trusted Mr. Hunsche to properly collect and pay employment taxes but Mr. Hunsche admitted that he chose to spend the money to build his empire," Tyler Hatcher, special agent in charge of IRS-Criminal Investigations St. Louis Field Office, said in a news release.