Owner of addiction treatment chain has history of tax fraud, embezzlement
CRANSTON. R.I. (WJAR) — Michael Brier first crossed the feds more than a dozen years ago, when he was running a tax preparation business on the East Side of Providence, in the same building that housed Recovery Connection.
A judge shut down the tax business in 2010, saying there was evidence of Brier's repeated illegal and deceptive conduct.
Federal authorities claimed Brier’s tax business was doctoring returns to boost refunds.
Prosecutors claimed Brier underreported more than $1 million to the IRS.
A judge permanently banned Brier from preparing other people's taxes.
But in 2013, the judge found that Brier violated that order and sent him to federal prison for more than two years.
About 10 years earlier, in 2003 and 2004, Rhode Island state authorities charged Brier with embezzlement, accusing him of ripping off two clients that he was an accountant for.
A look at those case files shows a fitness center claimed Brier wrote more than $20,000 of unauthorized checks to himself, including forging the owner's signature.
Brier was also accused of writing nearly $100,000 of checks to himself from another client’s account.
He was sentenced to two years of home confinement in those cases.
Court documents show investigators working those cases had found Brier’s state accountant's license had previously been suspended for falsifying documents.
Detectives also found Brier had previous charges in other states including assault, drug, and ticket scalping accusations.
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So how did he have the addiction treatment business with that record?
“Part of the allegation is that this center should never have opened because our primary defendant, Mr. Brier, used false information to apply for federal health care funding using another individual’s name and identifying information,” U.S. Attorney Zachary Cunha said Thursday, while announcing the new charges against Brier.