While I am not excusing the son, this practice is quite common among restaurant owners. Cash flow is a huge problem so putting off payment of payroll taxes until the next quarter is a huge temptation.
Yup—and you get away with it for one quarter and you are a little cash short the next quarter after you bought the Maserati and then one more quarter since the mistress apartment rent is kinda high and before you know it....
Oops.
It really harms the employees. I think he got off light
“this practice is quite common among restaurant owners. Cash flow is a huge problem so putting off payment of payroll taxes until the next quarter is a huge temptation.”
I have worked with probably a thousand business owners over the the past 40 years. Very common not just with restaurants though. They get behind on taxes and it snowballs and after a few quarter doing it they cannot ever pay it back.
This and female employee embezzelers which is also very common.
I know of 4 business that just fired the female employee. They were too embarrased to report it to the police from the lack of watching the books. The ingenous ways women covered up their tracks should be taught in business classes.
One woman would write a check out to herself, photocopy it, cash it, then when the bank statement came in she would white out her name and put in the name of a vender. It was alwways for an off amount 389.89 or such and never just 400.00 which would be suspicious.
Then she would shrink it down and place it over the original bank statement check and photocopy it and repunch new holes in the new statment.
The owner caught it because he noticed the staments from the bank were star shaped and hers were round. She got him for 30,000 over 5-6 years or so.