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A Utah-based film producer was sentenced to an aggregate of six years in prison for tax evasion and forcibly retaking a house and land that had been seized under court order to pay his outstanding tax debt.

Paul Kenneth Cromar owned a home in Cedar Hills, Utah, and operated Blue Moon Productions LLC, a freelance film and media production company. According to the charges brought against him, Cromar did not file any federal income tax returns or pay any tax between 1999 and 2005. In 2005, the IRS conducted an audit and assessed him with $703,266.96 in taxes, interest and penalties.

Cromar did not make any payments towards his outstanding debt and took steps to obstruct the IRS’s ability to collect his delinquent taxes for the next decade. In 2019, a federal judge ordered that Cromar’s home be sold at auction to satisfy his tax obligations, which by then had ballooned to over $1 million. Cromar then attempted to stop the sale by filing false documents on the property’s title and with the IRS, including a false promissory note. He also sought to scare off potential purchasers of the home and IRS personnel with lawsuits filed.

Prior to the closing on the home’s sale, Cromar broke into the home property and occupied it for five months, using firearms, sandbags and wooden boards tactically placed throughout the house to keep people out.

In addition to his prison sentence, Cromar was ordered to serve three years of supervised release and to pay approximately $723,028.65 in restitution to the federal government as a condition of his supervised release.

Photo courtesy of Paul Kenneth Cromar’s X account