Another shoe dropped this week in the $15 million Starkey Laboratories embezzlement case, as the U.S. attorney filed a tax evasion charge against another former executive.
The government late Wednesday charged Jeffrey Lee Longtain with one count of filing a false tax return, making him the sixth person charged in the case. The charge was outlined in a felony information court filing that described a series of complicated schemes that allegedly resulted in Longtain receiving Starkey money improperly and then underreporting that income to the IRS from 2010 through 2015.
The criminal charge authorities ultimately leveled against Longtain had to do with a single false tax return Longtain filed for calendar-year 2014, which stated adjusted gross income of $502,576 when it was really $652,826, the court document said.
Attorneys for Longtain could not be reached for comment.
The fact that the government filed the charge under an "information" court report, instead of a criminal indictment, could signal that Longtain is cooperating with authorities and may eventually plead guilty.
"Clearly the nature of the filing is that it's very likely that there is a plea agreement that is likely to result," said Ed Magarian, a Minneapolis partner with the law firm Dorsey & Whitney who specializes in white collar criminal defense. He is not involved in the Starkey case. "And usually part of a plea agreement is cooperation with the government."
From 2006 until his firing in 2015, Longtain was the chief operating officer and president of a Starkey affiliate called Northland Hearing Centers, based in Oregon. In Wednesday's filing, the government accused Longtain of receiving but not reporting to the IRS $105,600 between 2010 and 2015 in the form of personal golf membership fees paid by Starkey suppliers Audiometrix LLC and Socio LLC.
"Longtain understood it was a conflict of interest for him to receive the payments, given his position at Northland," wrote U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger.
