Revenue Quebec fines Chinatown restaurant owners $800,000 for tax evasion
MONTREAL — Revenue Quebec announced Thursday it has slapped the owners of a restaurant in Montreal’s Chinatown with $800,000 in fines and 391 counts of tax evasion among other charges.
The fines are among the largest ever imposed on a Quebec restaurant and failure to pay them could result in jail time for owners Anh Tuan Dang and Thi Tuyet Dung Dang.
Revenue Quebec alleged that, between 2011 and 2013, the owners of the Pho Cali Vietnamese noodle shop filed false income tax returns and forged receipts to get out of paying taxes.
Quebec’s tax agency has cracked down on tax evasion in restaurants since it implemented sales-recording modules, called SRMs, in 2011.
SRMs are a kind of micro-computer that records financial transactions and send them to Revenue Quebec. If the data collected on the SRMs doesn’t match what restaurant owners are filing in their tax returns, they could land themselves in a world of hurt with the tax agency.
The Pho Cali owners are accused of having set up a parallel billing system in which they would circumvent their SRM-connected cash register.
A 2013 report from Revenue Quebec shows the tax department collected an additional $160 million in sales tax revenue since installing the SRMs in fall 2011.
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