Shore Businessman Sentenced for Tax Evasion

The owner of several Monmouth County-based air conditioning businesses can expect to spend five months in prison and another five months on house arrest for tax evasion.

Mark Trawinski, 59, or Morganville, was sentenced today in a Camden federal courtroom. He had previously pleaded guilty to an inforamtion charging him with willfully attempting to evade payments of accrued employer's quarterly federal taxes and the associated trust fund recovery penalties, according to the office of New Jersey U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman.

Trawinski was also ordered to serve three years of supervised release and pay $713,759 restitution to the Internal Revenue Service.

According to court documents, Trawinski failed to report the federal employment taxes for workers in Air Joy Service, Heating and Cooling, Air Joy Service Inc., and Air Joy Sheet Metal, during various quarters betweem March 31, 2002 and September 30, 2007.

Prosecutors say that Trawinski was dunned $713,759 in trust fund recovery penalties by the IRS over a two-year span starting in 2006, the year after he bought a $1,000,000 vacation home in Port Orange, Florida.

Authorities say that Trawinski placed the deet and mortgage in his mother's name and paid $544,673 toward the mortgage between 2005 and 2010, drawing money from bank accounts associated with the heating and air conditioning businesses. He filed for bankruptcy in 2007, say investigators, but failed to list the Florida property among his assets.

The IRS Small Business-Self Employment Collections Division levied several of Trawinski's bank accounts in 2009 to recover the trust fund penalty. That November, he submitted a collection information statement for wage earners and self-employed individuals to an IRS agent, signed under penalty of perjury.

Authorities say he omitted the Florida house, told the agent that his son ran the HVAC businesses despite having no experience in the field, and added that he drew no wages and had no assets or income.