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Dean Tran, 48, of Fitchburg, was convicted in September on 20 counts of wire fraud and three counts of submitting false tax returns after a six-day trial.
BOSTON (AP) — A former Massachusetts state senator was sentenced Friday to 18 months in jail for scheming to defraud the state Division of Unemployment Help and accumulating revenue that he did not report back to the Inner Income Service.
Dean Tran, 48, of Fitchburg, was convicted in September on 20 counts of wire fraud and three counts of submitting false tax returns after a six-day trial.
After the Republican’s time period resulted in 2021, Tran fraudulently obtained pandemic unemployment advantages whereas concurrently employed as a paid marketing consultant for a New Hampshire-based retailer of automotive elements, investigators mentioned.
“When Dean Tran took his oath of workplace as a Massachusetts State Senator, he willingly entered right into a world of being within the public eye. He selected to violate the general public’s belief not as soon as, however twice by defrauding the federal government out of unemployment advantages and willfully omitting his taxable revenue,” U.S. Legal professional Leah B. Foley mentioned. “His fraud and calculated deception erode the general public’s belief in elected officers and diverted cash away from those that actually wanted it.”
Tran mentioned in an announcement that he’s planning to enchantment his verdict “whatever the sentence” Friday and insisted there was “no defrauding, stealing or scheming” with pandemic unemployment help.
“It was clear within the feedback made within the courtroom that the driving elements behind my investigation had been weaponization and lawfare,” he mentioned. “I’m harmless. That is nothing greater than a politically motivated witchhunt.”
Whereas working as a paid marketing consultant for the Automotive Components Firm, Tran fraudulently collected $30,120 in pandemic unemployment advantages. Tran additionally hid $54,700 in consulting revenue that he obtained from the Automotive Components Firm from his 2021 federal revenue tax return, in keeping with prosecutors. This was along with hundreds of {dollars} in revenue that Tran hid from the IRS whereas accumulating hire from tenants who rented his Fitchburg property from 2020 to 2022.
Alongside together with his jail time period, Tran was ordered to pay extra $25,000 to the Massachusetts Division of Unemployment Help, greater than $23,000 to the Inner Income Service, in addition to a $7,500 high-quality.
Tran was the primary Vietnamese American elected to state workplace in Massachusetts.
Tran unsuccessfully challenged Democratic U.S. Rep. Lori Trahan for the congressional seat representing the state’s third Congressional District in 2022.
In 2020, the Massachusetts Senate barred him from interacting together with his workers besides by official emails within the wake of an ethics investigation that discovered that he had his workers conduct marketing campaign work throughout common Senate enterprise hours.
