ollowing a finding of guilty by the court in April, Bienfait's Jerry McCaw was sentenced to 14 months in jail.
Between 2006 and 2008 McCaw evaded the payment of $114,924 after failing to report $548,044 in taxable income. His company, Jake's Oilfield Construction Ltd., was also found guilty of assisting him in evading taxes when he changed his status at the company from employee to that of a subcontractor.
Through his business, he evaded paying another $99,607 in taxes. McCaw was sentenced in Estevan provincial court last week, and along with the jail sentence, McCaw was fined 100 per cent of the tax evaded. In all, that came to a total of $264,335. On top of the fine, McCaw is also still expected to pay the evaded tax.
Evidence provided to the courts over the trial showed McCaw paid fees over a two-year period to Gerald Blerot, an educator with the Paradigm Education Group, operated by Russell Porisky.
He paid Blerot roughly $595 per month beginning in September 2007. Blerot is currently before the courts in Saskatchewan, charged with tax evasion and aiding, abetting and counselling others to commit tax evasion.
When delivering his guilty decision in April, Judge Karl Bazin said, "Mr. McCaw, unfortunately like so many others, has fallen for the false ideology associated with the natural person tax protester movement and had actively tried to convince others, with some success, to follow this pattern of thinking."
A bookkeeper at Jake's Oilfield noted in her testimony during the trial that McCaw set up a meeting in the spring of 2006 with many people attending, including herself and her husband. The meeting was about the Paradigm Education Group and natural person theory. She testified the gist of the meeting was about how to avoid paying tax by being a natural person.
A CBC report from May 10, 2012, noted that Porisky, a resident of Chilliwack, B.C., was sentenced last May for his role with the group, counselling hundreds of people to evade millions of dollars in income tax.
Personally, Porisky made about $1.2 million from his teachings of the natural person theory, and reported none of that income to the Canadian Revenue Agency.
His theory states that natural people under Canadian tax law do not need to pay taxes. By declaring oneself a natural person, they are no longer artificial people, which is a category created by the Canadian government.
The story noted Porisky was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison and fined $275,000.
Porisky was then released on bail in November 2012 while he awaits his appeal hearing.
