Aurora business owner sentenced for employment tax evasion

Date: Nov. 20, 2025

Contact: newsroom@ci.irs.gov

Shandel Arkadie was sentenced to 12 months and one day in federal prison on October 10, 2025, and ordered to pay more than $1.2 million in restitution for failure to pay over payroll taxes to the Internal Revenue Service.

Arkadie owned a home health care business, Alternative Choice Home Care Nursing LLC in Aurora, Colorado, and managed the company’s internal books and financial records. As owner and operator, Arkadie was responsible for withholding income taxes from Alternative Choice’s employees’ wages and paying those funds over to the IRS each quarter. She was also responsible for paying over Alternative Choice’s portion of Social Security and Medicare taxes.

Between January 2015 and December 2020, Alternative Choice withheld over $1,000,000 from its employees’ wages but Arkadie did not pay the funds over to the IRS or file the requisite quarterly tax returns. In addition, the company owed approximately $500,000 in Social Security and Medicare taxes, which she did not pay.

“Shandel Arkadie is spending the next 12 months in jail and will be paying back the federal government for much longer than that,” said Amanda Prestegard, Special Agent in Charge, IRS-CI Denver Field Office. “Her actions were motivated by greed with a complete disregard for her employees. We appreciate our partnership with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in helping us hold employment tax cheats accountable for victimizing not only the IRS, but even worse, their own dedicated workforce.”

Employment tax investigations are a high priority for IRS Criminal Investigation and represent an important investigative initiative as part of its core investigative mission, the investigation of tax crimes.

Preparing false payroll tax returns or failing to file employment tax returns are methods commonly used to evade employment taxes. In these cases, employees also suffer because they may not qualify for social security, Medicare, or unemployment benefits (or they may qualify for reduced benefits) as a sole result of their employer’s actions.

IRS Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) is the law enforcement arm of the IRS, responsible for conducting financial crime investigations, including tax fraud, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, public corruption, healthcare fraud, identity theft and more. IRS-CI special agents are the only federal law enforcement agents with investigative jurisdiction over violations of the Internal Revenue Code, obtaining a 90% federal conviction rate. The agency has 19 field offices located across the U.S. and 14 attaché posts abroad.