Virginia lawyer dodged taxes using Chinese shell corporation, defrauded US military

NEWPORT News, Va. (WRIC) — A Newport Information attorney who sat on the state bar’s disciplinary committee dodged around $800,000 in taxes and defrauded the U.S. navy by passing off Chinese-made materials as American-produced.

Nosuk Kim, 61, is a prominent lawyer, landlord and protection contractor who will now provide 4 years and 4 months in prison following she plead responsible to tax evasion and admitted to defrauding the U.S. navy when she did business with them.

“By virtue of her career, the defendant was uniquely positioned to know that she was violating the regulation,” prosecutors wrote. “And she did it anyway.”

In accordance to a assertion of info, agreed to by Kim as section of her plea arrangement, Nosuk and her spouse, Beyung Kim, owned the I-Tek company, a defense contractor that was awarded tens of millions of bucks in federal government contracts between 2011 and 2018.

As part of the conditions of people contracts, I-Tek was necessary to do two matters: initially, it had to set apart a specific portion of its business for providers run by company-disabled veterans, and next, less than the “Buy American Act” it had to ensure that the items it was offering were being designed in the United States.

The Kims falsely claimed that I-Tek was a “service-disabled veteran-owned smaller business.”

According to the prosecution’s sentencing memorandum, a paralegal at Kim’s legislation agency — who was in fact a disabled veteran — was outlined as the company’s president, even however she owned no stake in the company and never ever served as president.

“This had the sensible outcome of letting I-Tek to take contracts away from compact businesses owned by company-disabled veterans,” the prosecution wrote.

They also consistently ordered low cost goods from abroad and passed them off as American-manufactured. In 1 agreement with the Indiana National Guard, they offered 30,000 recruitment t-shirts from China, then imported them by means of a shell company and taken off tags displaying their country of origin in get to pass them off as American-created.

They also defrauded the U.S. Maritime Corps in a equivalent way on a $6.7 million contract for “promotional components.”

To stay clear of taxes on their fraudulent gains, they wired $970,000 to a shell corporation based in China, then re-routed that money back to the states, depositing it in the account of Nosuk Kim’s regulation company, Cowardin & Kim.

From there, she utilized the funds to shell out off her Newport News Home, invest in out the other traders in a professional serious estate organization and then pay off that company’s financial debt.

On their tax return that calendar year, the Kims claimed earning $334,287 — fully omitting the $970,000 they obtained from their fraudulent contracts.

The up coming yr, they routed a different $1.25 million as a result of the same series of shell corporations and trusts, making use of the money to pay off organization financial loans on their industrial serious estate and yet again omitting the cash totally from their tax returns.

“The defendant’s tax fraud triggered additional than $869,000 in reduction to the United States in just a two-yr period of time,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memorandum. “There was no monetary exigency or cause to do any of this. On the contrary, through this same time period, the defendant and her spouse lived a lifestyle of luxurious in their waterfront property on the James River and made sizeable sums of income from the defendant’s regulation practice, their joint real-estate holdings, and her husband’s enterprise.”

In their conclusion, prosecutors known as on Kim to be sentenced to just less than four yrs in prison, composing that her crimes ended up fully commited “in disregard of 1 of her most basic obligations as a citizen of the United States.”

But in her possess sentencing letter, Kim requested leniency, inquiring for a sentence “well underneath the guideline variety,” which advised a sentence between 46 and 57 months.

Kim wrote that she was the principal caretaker — in addition to a hired entire-time aide — for her 28-calendar year-outdated autistic son, and wrote that, “It is most likely that [he] will regress as a final result of Kim’s incarceration.”

The courtroom was evidently unconvinced by either side’s argument, imposing a sentence of 52 months, 6 months extra than that asked for by the prosecution.