Yu-Ling Wong, owner of Bellevue Taiwanese restaurant Facing East, was charged in 2016 with tax theft of an estimated $395,000 using “sales suppression” software. She pleaded guilty Wednesday.
The owner of a Bellevue restaurant pleaded guilty Wednesday to using software that deleted transactions and allowed her to steal an estimated $395,000 in sales taxes.
Yu-Ling Wong, the owner of Taiwanese restaurant Facing East, has agreed to pay $300,000 in restitution to the Department of Revenue. The Everett man who sold Wong the software pleaded guilty in December. and was sentenced to 18 months in prison in April.
This was the first prosecution in the United States for the use of sales suppression software, according to a news release from the office of Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson, which prosecuted the case.
“Sales suppression software helps dishonest businesses steal from Washington taxpayers,” Ferguson said in the statement.
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Facing East’s missing taxes were brought to light when auditors looking over the restaurant’s 2010 to 2013 tax returns found that only 7 percent of the restaurant’s sales were in cash — far below normal — that cash tips on some days exceeded the restaurant’s total cash sales, and that bills seemed to be paid minutes after orders were put in the system.
The software Wong used at the end of each month would erase her sales until the cash transactions reached a specified level. Then the software would tell her how much cash to take out of the register to balance the books.