DOJ: Former Operators of Michigan Adult Foster Care Homes Sentenced for Income and Employment Tax Crimes

I hope we are not finished with these adult foster care homes because these are the "promised land" for many aging out of foster care who do not wish to live on the streets.

FUN FACT! A CORPORATE PARENT IS ONLY OBLIGATED TO GIVE A RESIDENT $40 A MONTH FROM THE $771.00 MONTHLY SSI PAYMENT

The owners and operators of multiple Michigan adult foster care homes were sentenced today for federal tax crimes. Jeremiah Cheff was sentenced to 27 months in prison, and Nicolette Cheff was sentenced to two years of probation, announced Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Richard E. Zuckerman of the Justice Department’s Tax Division and U.S. Attorney Matthew Schneider for the Eastern District of Michigan.

According to court documents and the evidence presented at trial, Jeremiah and Nicolette Cheff (“the Cheffs”) owned and controlled the financial and business operations of 16 foster care homes that cared for individuals with mental illnesses and developmental and physical disabilities.  From September 2010 through September 2014, the Cheffs withheld payroll taxes from employees’ paychecks, but failed to timely file payroll tax returns and pay over the withheld funds to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).  Jeremiah Cheff also failed to file several individual income tax returns and, when the IRS attempted to collect unpaid payroll taxes, he sent the IRS a false financial instrument claiming to be worth $80,000 and falsely claimed to a revenue officer that he had paid the taxes due.

On April 11, 2017, Nicolette Cheff pleaded guilty to failing to file an Employer’s Quarterly Federal Tax Return and failing to file an Individual Income Tax Return.

On May 20, 2019, a jury found Jeremiah Cheff guilty of 60 counts of willfully failing to account for and pay over payroll taxes. He was also convicted of corruptly endeavoring to obstruct the IRS, and failing to timely file his 2013 through 2015 individual income tax returns.

In addition to the term of imprisonment imposed, United States District Judge Linda V. Parker ordered Jeremiah Cheff to serve two years of supervised release, and ordered both to pay restitution in the amount of $199,647 to the IRS.

Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Zuckerman and U.S. Attorney Schneider commended special agents of IRS-Criminal Investigation, who conducted the investigation, and Trial Attorneys Jeffrey A. McLellan and Carl F. Brooker, IV, of the Tax Division, who prosecuted the case.

Additional information about the Tax Division and its enforcement efforts may be found on the Division’s website.

Voting is beautiful, be beautiful ~ vote.©

Homeless Mom Given Tough Choice: Leave DC or Place Children in Foster Care

Posted on February 15, 2011 by Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless

By Marta Beresin, Staff Attorney

Last week a mother of three was given an ultimatum by the DC Child and Family Services Administration:  get on a Greyhound bus for a shelter placement in another state or we’ll place your children in foster care.  The alleged neglect or abuse?  Being financially unable to afford to provide a home for her children.   As a matter of law, the District had no basis for making such a threat.  It is firmly established that parents have a Constitutional right to care for their children and that a parent’s inability to provide for a child due to circumstances of poverty is not a basis for removing a child.

What’s sadly ironic is that this mother had been to the Virginia Williams Family Resource Center (“FRC”), the central intake site for homeless families in need of shelter repeatedly during the prior two weeks, pleading for the very thing that the District claimed she was neglectfully failing to provide.  Each time she had been told – as many others have been this winter – that there was no room for her and her children at DC General, the filled-to-capacity (with 152 families as of 2/10/11) winter shelter for families in the District.

In part, this mother’s odyssey may have been due to action the DC Council took in December, when 9 members of the Council passed the Homeless Services Reform Amendment Act of 2010 (“HSRA Amendment”).  The bill establishes, for the first time, strict residency verification requirements for families applying for life-saving hypothermia shelter.  While the HSRA Amendment has yet to become law, some of its harshest consequences are already being visited on families.  The attempt to force the aforementioned mother to move to another state for shelter for her family was born out of the misimpression that she was not a District resident.  Nobody at the FRC had checked her ID (which was a DC driver’s license) or her other documents showing existing ties to the District

Unfortunately, the denial of shelter to families has been commonplace this winter, even on days when freezing temperatures trigger the right to shelter.  Residency has been but one illegal barrier placed in the way of families accessing shelter:  FRC staff have also demanded custody orders and verifiable proof that the family is in an unsafe place or sleeping outside, the absence of which cannot be grounds for denying shelter placement under current law.

The myriad barriers to families accessing shelter have made clear that, more than the recently passed residency bill, shelter denials are the result of poor planning by the Department of Human Services and the Interagency Council on Homelessness (“ICH”).  As advocates on the ICH had predicted, the Winter Plan did not create enough capacity for homeless families this winter.  The District’s plan to move families into housing to free up enough shelter space to meet the increased winter need has not moved forward as fully or quickly as promised.  Every day, the FRC sees many more families than the system can accommodate; it is District parents and children who are forced to pay the price.

What’s more, a huge budget deficit looms for FY 2012, and the DC Council has shown little inclination towards raising revenues to preserve safety net programs – despite the fact that we are in the midst of the greatest recession since the Great Depression and that as a result family homelessness has risen 35% between 2008 and 2010.  For families in crisis trying to access shelter, any cut to homeless services in FY 2012 clearly will have devastating consequences given the already inadequate system of support currently in place.

The family described above is now sheltered safely in the District, but you can help us assure that no parent again faces such a choice.  Join us in asking the Mayor to open up additional hypothermia capacity for families so that the next family in crisis who turns to the public safety net for assistance can secure the lifesaving supports they need to survive the harsh winter months.  You can email Mayor Gray at eom@dc.gov.

Foster Care Fosters Homelessness

Life can be hard for children in foster care. There's the question of an unpleasant and unwanted split from the biological parents, the potential shuffling from foster home to foster home, and eventually, according to a comprehensive new report, the very real possibility of homelessness when youths "age out" of the foster care system at age 18. Unfortunately, it looks like adulthood can be even harder than childhood for the 30,000 youths who turn 18 each year and leave the foster care system.

Forty percent of them will be homeless, including couch surfing, at some point before age 24. (The study is over, but I'd be interested to know how many experience homelessness later in life.) Diane Zambito, who runs Connected by 25, a Tampa nonprofit that provides mentors and transitional services to those who age out of foster care, told NPR that she remembers when things were even worse. Ten years ago, she said, many foster care teens put their belongings in a plastic bag and got a ride to the nearest homeless shelter. Happy birthday!

Even today's youth who manage to avoid homelessness don't fare well. By their mid-20s, just half the foster care vets had jobs and six percent had college degrees. In contrast, a majority of the young men had been convicted of a crime and a majority of the young women were on public assistance.

"We took them away from their parents on the assumption that we as a society would do a better job of raising them," University of Washington and Partners for Our Children researcher Mark Courtney told the New York Times. "We've invested a lot money and time in their care, and by many measures they're still doing very poorly."

Courtney and fellow researchers from the University of Washington and the University of Chicago'sChapin Hall Center for Children looked at more than 600 foster care youths in Illinois, Iowa and Wisconsin, the majority of whom had entered foster care in their early teens. While younger children are often adopted, teens rarely are.

There are potential solutions — use matching funds from the federal government to allow young people to remain in foster care until age 21, as Illinois, New York, Vermont and Washington, D.C. do, and provide more transitional support — but during the recession, stopping the cycle of foster care to homelessness and poverty is not, disturbingly, a priority for cash-strapped states.