Owner of Sewell landscaping company gets prison sentence for tax evasion

The owner of a Sewell-based landscaping company was sentenced Friday to one year and a day in prison for evading taxes on more than $2 million in business receipts, according to a release from the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

Nicholas Lepore, 40, of Deptford, owner of Down to Earth Landscaping and Irrigation Inc., was also ordered by U.S. District Judge Robert B. Kugler to serve two years of supervised release and pay a $5,000 fine.

Lepore pled guilty to tax evasion in December 2014. At that time, the maximum prison sentence was five years.

According to the Internal Revenue Service, Down to Earth was a subchapter S corporation and Lepore, as the owner, was required to report income and losses from Down to Earth on his personal tax returns.

According to the release, Lepore said he cashed customer checks at local check cashing businesses to hide income Down to Earth received.

During the following years, the IRS said Lepore cashed Down to Earth customer checks in the following amounts: 2007, $746,415; 2008, $415,631; 2009, $317,053 and 2010, $669,763.

Lepore admitted that he did not file tax returns from 2007 to 2010. As a result, he did not include any customer checks as income, the release states.