Puyallup car dealer had license revoked. Now AG accuses manager of stealing tax money
The manager of a closed used-car dealership in Puyallup was charged this week with felony theft for allegedly keeping more than $131,000 of retail-sales taxes collected through vehicle sales that should have been remitted to the Department of Revenue.
The state Attorney General’s Office accused Stanley J. Stevens of first-degree theft in Pierce County Superior Court for failing to remit the funds between 2019 and 2022 while operating Puyallup Truck & RV Sales. Instead, charges allege that Stevens pocketed the money by depositing funds into bank accounts controlled by him and his wife.
Stevens, 41, was convicted in 2011 of conspiracy to commit odometer fraud in federal court, and, according to charging documents, investigators suspect he recruited his nephew to act as a “straw owner” to get a dealership license. The nephew was 19 years old when he became the business owner in 2016.
A summons was issued Tuesday for Stevens to appear for arraignment and enter a plea in the case Jan. 31. An attorney for the defendant was not yet listed in court records. A phone number for the business appeared to be disconnected Thursday.
An investigator in the Attorney General’s Office’s major economic crimes unit began looking at Puyallup Truck & RV Sales in 2021 following an audit by the Department of Revenue that found the business was under-reporting its revenue. In 2017, the dealership’s revenue was more than $1.2 million, according to court documents, but it reported only $6,500 in gross revenue to the state.
Stanley told an auditor he relied on sales jacket file folders for each sale to report the gross income and that about 174 of the files were stolen from the car of the dealership’s sales clerk when she was transporting them to a storage facility.
When an auditor requested copies of the business’ federal income tax returns for 2017 to 2020, Stevens reportedly said he didn’t file any returns with the Internal Revenue Service during those years because the owner, his nephew, didn’t think the business made enough money to file.
Puyallup Truck & RV Sales, which did business at 15317 Meridian E., Puyallup, shut down permanently in 2022 when the Department of Licensing revoked its dealership license following its own investigation. That inquiry reportedly found numerous instances of lack of compliance with DOL regulations and other mandatory business practices.
Further investigation into the business determined that $1,897,460.00 of funds collected through vehicle transactions were deposited into bank accounts for Stevens or his wife between 2019 and 2022, but the dealership only reported $27,000 in revenue to the DOR in that time, records show.
Stevens allegedly retained $131,678 in sales-tax funds collected through the transactions, and only $2,758 was remitted to the DOR.
An investigator interviewed more than 30 of the business’ customers and learned that a majority of them found the vehicle for sale on sites like Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace and paid in cash. The business accepted credit cards, the investigator wrote in court records, but some customers were told the service fee would be as much as 30 percent.
The business also routinely charged a 10 percent sales tax even though the actual retail sales tax in Puyallup was 9.9 percent from 2018 through June 2021.
Several customers reported that they wrote separate checks for the sales tax that were made out to 161 Auto & RV Sales. According to the probable cause document, it’s an LLC that was not licensed with DOL or registered with DOR, and it did not report income or pay taxes. The business owner was another of Stevens’ nephews.
“Both DOL and I concluded that PTRS was aware they going to have their dealership license revoked and began migrating their business identity over to ‘161 Auto & RV Sales company,’” the investigator wrote in court records.
A search warrant was executed at the dealership in February 2022. Inside, investigators found financial documents for bank accounts that were not reported to DOR and hundreds of sales jackets among other evidence. A large number of them were found in a white plastic garbage bag under several boxes.
“The PTRS sales jacket filing system was non-existent,” the investigator wrote in the probable cause document.
Although Stevens’ nephew was the business owner, investigators found he did not control the finances or overall management of the dealership.
The nephew signed a rental agreement for the business’ office and signed business-creation documents, records state. But it was Stevens who signed checks for the landlord and the DOL for title fees, and he signed all but a few vehicle title documents. He also reportedly used his personal CashApp and Venmo accounts to accept deposits or issue refunds to customers.
