The Story

A young woman is getting ready to take her son to school. The next thing she knows her apartment is swarming with government agents. She is being arrested , handcuffed and taken to jail. She is charged with fraud and a multitude of other charges. She endures the stress of over two years of court hearings. She is intimidated by the charges and a potential prison sentence. She is lied to regarding the expected length of the sentence and is induced by her own attorney into pleading guilty to something they both knew she didn’t do. She is repeatedly told that her side of the story is irrelevant, therefore it is never told. Can this happen in 2025? It just did.

Our system of justice does not currently operate based on the values we have been taught over the years. It is based on overcriminalization of behavior and intimidation of the defendant to lead to a plea bargain. Over 95% of Federal cases brought result in pleas and the attorneys on both sides are complicit in the process. There appears to be an unspoken understanding that a trial should not happen and the best a defendant can expect is to take a plea. The idea of a trial by jury in the Federal system appears to be on the verge of extinction.

The purpose of this website is to tell the story that was not allowed to be told in court. You will also learn of the flaws in the prosecution’s case which would have been brought out if a trial had occurred but were effectively covered up by by means of the plea bargain. Our hope is that someone in a position of authority will see that there has been a miscarriage of justice that needs to be corrected.

The system of justice in this country appears to be broken. The representatives of our government, the FBI and the US Attorney, investigate until they find a charge that might stick then create a scenario to fit their perception. They resort to exaggeration and misrepresentation to add fantom charges in hopes of overwhelming a defendant and forcing a plea agreement. Their main focus appears to be padding their conviction statistics. The defense attorney in this case was supposed to be an experienced Federal attorney who would fight for her client. As it turned out she was merely someone who rubber stamped the prosecutions case. She had all of the information but didn’t present it to the prosecution or the court. She repeatedly said that the truth didn’t matter.

Jamie McGowen was bullied by the system, the prosecution and her own attorney into pleading guilty to something she didn’t do. All she did was answer one question wrong on the PPP application and that made her guilty. According to her attorney if she pleaded guilty she would probably serve about three months in jail. If she went to trial she would be found guilty anyway because of the way the question was answered. A trial would make the Judge mad and she could be sentenced to 20 years instead of three months. The exaggerations and misrepresentations in the Indictment were carried into the plea agreement making it seem much worse than it was. The prospect of spending 20 years in jail scared her into pleading guilty. Her attorney knew Jamie was going to have to plead guilty to things she didn’t do so she sent a subordinate who was unfamiliar with the case to handle the plea hearing. The substitute attorney told her to just say yes to anything the Judge said.  Her attorney had documentation that those things weren’t true so she couldn’t ethically tell her to agree with everything. 

 If the FBI and the US Attorney had been interested in getting to the truth instead of merely padding their conviction statistics after a shoddy investigation they most likely would not have brought this case. They took a very complicated situation and tried to make it simple. Neither of the attorneys, prosecution or defense, understood the details of the situation. They found the low hanging fruit and created a scenario fit the facts they chose to believe. The examples they used in the indictment support the defendant’s case rather than the prosecutions. The deep pockets of the government and the intimidation they can create strike fear into whoever gets caught in it’s tentacles.

Someone in a position of authority must care about the truth. A young woman who never intended to defraud anyone and who was meticulous about correctly calculating the PPP application amounts using real payroll numbers has been sentenced to spending 37 months of her life in prison. This isn’t right but it doesn’t appear that anyone cares.

 Jamie was arrested in November 2022 at her apartment in Orange County, California. We quickly found an attorney in Portland, Oregon since that was where the trial was to take place. Although the businesses in question here were primarily in Oregon, witnesses were probably split between Oregon and California. When we read the indictment, we realized that it was filed with misinterpretations and outright falsehoods. We felt that when the truth came out everyone would see how that differed from the indictment. We still feel that way. Nothing much happened after the arrest. There were a couple of minor hearings scheduled but they were continued. The surprising thing to me is that the Portland attorney said the prosecutor called him asking for a continuance. What was funny is that he said that the defense had to ask for the continuance even though the prosecution wanted it. That will be important later. The Portland attorney obtained 16,000 plus pages of discovery from the prosecution. We asked them to forward this to us so we could go through it to determine what was relevant and what we could attack. They began sending it in pieces. Unfortunately, much of it was redacted. I realized that the time they were spending redacting would cost a fortune and much of the information we needed was being redacted so we stopped that. 

 In October 2023 I traveled to Portland and spent a couple of days in the attorney’s office reviewing the discovery. I noticed a couple of things. First, many of the 16,000 pages were irrelevant. The prosecution sent the discovery formatted so as to require the recipient to take as much time as possible. Many of these pages were single pages of bank statements which stated on them “this page intentionally left blank”. It appeared to me to be intended to make it as difficult and expensive as possible to gather the relevant information. Secondly, much of the discovery was bank statements. These generally support our arguments not theirs. If they had actually analyzed the discovery that they had, they would have had to change their counts in the indictment because they don’t support their case.

There was little that happened after that because from January to mid-April because that’s tax season and we are working upwards of 100 hours per week during that time. The Court was generally accommodating except for an issue that happened during early April 2024. The Portland attorney didn’t communicate much. There was a status hearing scheduled in early April 2024. The attorney claimed that he sent Jamie an email telling her of the hearing. She claims that she never received it. Needless to say, she did not show up at the hearing. That caused a problem with the Judge. The status hearing was rescheduled for late April 2024 and everyone was there. Jamie was severely scolded by the Judge. She was then required to periodically report to someone in Southern California.

 At that point it was clear that we needed to get a new attorney and he agreed that he wanted out. The Judge agreed and gave us 30 days to find a new one. We needed someone with Federal Court experience. We found a firm in Atlanta who claimed to only do Federal work. We had a phone interview and felt strongly that they would fight for her and get our story before the Court and the Prosecution. We felt that once the true story was told some kind of middle ground could be reached that would satisfy everyone. That never happened. 

 In retrospect it appears that we hired a firm whose primary interest was to arrange a plea deal. Jamie said  that her attorney was trying to convince her to take a plea deal, so we went to Atlanta to meet her face to face in early October 2024. Every time I explained what had really happened, she said it didn’t matter. The fact that the PPP applications had the box checked NO rather than YES meant she was liable for fraud. The fact that her father who is a CPA and is the one who read the PPP rules and advised her how advised her how to answer the question was irrelevant. Not only is she not allowed to rely on this  advice in this matter, the attorney stated that if he testified to giving her the advice, both be prosecuted. We left Atlanta wondering how the truth could cause both of us to be prosecuted. There was a hearing date set for late October and the attorney was not ready for trial. She requested a continuance and the Judge erupted saying this had gone for too long (even though previous delays were from the prosecution). The Judge gave two choices; either make a plea agreement or go to trial by November 15. The prosecution had previously offered a plea deal, however, there was apparently no discussion of the penalty portion. The attorney  assured Jamie that a few months would be all she would serve. The deal was struck and agreement signed. 

The plea hearing was set for early December 2024. Jamie’s attorney  didn’t show up for the hearing. She sent one of the lower-level attorneys in the firm. Jamie was told to simply answer yes to anything they read into the record regardless if she believed it or not. It was very hard to hear her admitting to behavior that she really didn’t do. I now believe that the reason her primary attorney didn’t show up for the plea hearing is because we had given her documented proof that the Al’s Trailers payroll tax returns that she filed for 2019 were the correct ones and that the ones the prosecutor was relying on were the false ones. I don’t believe she could have allowed Jamie to say that she falsified the returns when she knew they were correct. The attorney she sent , however, was unaware of the facts of the case , therefore could tell her to agree to anything they said in the hearing with no ethical dilema.

I talked to the attorney later and she said the next step was to prepare for the sentencing hearing which was scheduled for April 29. There was virtually no communication during tax season. In early April Jamie received an email regarding letters of support. I didn’t see that email that letter until April 21. I called her and she was able to get the hearing continued to May 15 so could accumulate those letters. The letters appear to have made no difference. At the hearing the Judge went strictly by the guidelines with no allowances for any mitigation. Jamie was allowed to make a statement. When she said that the PPP amounts were correctly calculated (which they were) and that she never intended to defraud the government ( which she didn’t) the prosecutor interrupted her and essentially shouted down stating she admitted to the fraud so don’t sympathize with her now. Nothing for her to worry about. The judge made it clear that she wasn’t going to be swayed by the truth . The statement that Jamie made at the sentencing hearing was the only time I heard the truth spoken in court during the entire process. Twice during the sentencing hearing Jamie’s attorney had to apologize to the Judge for not being prepared for whatever question the Judge asked.

The result was nothing like what we expected or what we were told to expect by the attorney.

Jamie has been bullied by the system, the prosecutor and even her own attorney into admitting something she would never do. The bullying occurred by the threat of 20 years in prison if she failed to admit she committed fraud. She has been lumped in with the people who falsified payroll data to get PPP money for their own use. If Jamie had answered the question yes instead of no she would have qualified for the same amount of PPP money. None of that has mattered to date. We hope it can matter to someone sometime.

This process started when Undleeb Dhar (the whistleblower) went to the FBI to report unpaid payroll taxes. The FBI is not the organization within the government with expertise in payroll taxes the Internal Revenue Service is. The IRS deals with unpaid taxes every day. They attempt to collect the taxes from the company and perform a 100% penalty investigation to determine how much in “trust fund” taxes remains unpaid. As part of the investigation they determine who is responsible for the unpaid taxes and make an assessment. 

Mr. Dhar wanted to avoid an IRS investigation because he knew they would assess the taxes to him as the owner of the company and check signer. The FBI performed a shoddy investigation that went nowhere. Unlike the IRS the FBI made no attempt to evaluate who is responsible they merely try to create a criminal charge to reflect the facts as they see them.

If the IRS had performed the investigation they would have assessed the tax during 2019 and started the collection process at that time. Instead, the FBI and US Attorney created a false scenario piecing together a few facts with lies and misrepresentations from the whistleblower.

The US Attorney created an indictment describing a mythical “scheme” by Jamie McGowen. They claimed that McGowen failed to pay funds to the IRS and “instead used the funds for personal expenditures”. The simple fact that the taxes were unpaid apparently was the crime. They had the analysis of where the money went they ignored it. They added wire fraud and money laundering charges because the banks and payroll companies use servers in multiple states. Every business uses these servers daily, so any company suspected of a crime automatically has these charges added simply by using their bank account.

The following is a summary of the payments from the payroll account:

Payroll checks paid 

$3,067,623

State payroll taxes paid 

350,335

Dhar transfers back to Al’s Trailers 

280,000

Purchase of I-5 RV Dealership   

165,000

Kia purchase – Killeen 

28,736

Klamath Falls RV Dealership Purchase 

111,034

Repay loan from Valley Accounting 

62,000

Payoff Sutherlin RV unit 

79,000

Kia Purchase McGowen 

25,000

McGowen draws 

9,000

Total Disbursed 

$4,177,728

If this was a “scheme” to enrich McGowen it failed miserably. The funds that went to McGowen's benefit were $34,000. On the other hand the funds that went to Dhar’s benefit totaled $634,034. Dhar knew the IRS would recognize this. He counted on the FBI doing a superficial investigation which wouldn’t hold him responsible. In the indictment the US Attorney sited two examples of McGowen's culpability. First was a $200,000 transfer back to Al’s Trailers. This transfer was done by Dhar through his bookkeeper who possessed a stamp with McGowen's signature. She didn’t even know about the transfer until sometime later. Dhar as the owner of Al’s Trailers was the beneficiary of this transaction. The second example was a transfer to Sutherlin RV (another of Dhar’s companies) to payoff an out of trust unit. If the unit was not paid the flooring company was threatening to freeze the flooring line.

During the summer of 2020 Dhar contacted SBA to report McGowen for applying for PPP money for Al’s Trailers when it was no longer an operating company. SBA looked at this issue and determined that it wasn’t factual, however they decided that McGowen had answered one of the certification questions incorrectly which constituted fraud. The US Attorney then took this single issue and created a fictional count based on payroll tax returns from 2019.

Paragraphs 29 and 30 of the indictment are false. McGowen did not “devise a material scheme to defraud the SBA and various financial institutions to obtain money and property by means of materially false and fraudulent pretenses, representation and promises” as is alleged in paragraph 29. She did not use “materially false information with the intent to steal and convert the proceeds to her personal use without intent to use the funds for any authorized purpose” as is alleged in paragraph 30.

Paragraphs 31 through 37 of the indictment details two sets of payroll tax returns filed for Al’s Trailers for the year 2019. The FBI and US Attorney didn’t analyze the returns they simply assumed that the returns filed by Dhar were the real ones and the ones filed by McGowen were falsified. They made this assumption without investigation because it fit their scenario. The problem is that a false scenario yields false conclusions.

In fact, the returns filed by McGowen were the correct ones and the ones filed by Dhar (and relied on by the US Attorney) were the falsified ones. The indictment coupled with the prosecution's discovery (the 2019 bank statements) prove that McGowen's returns were correct.

Every one of Mcgowens PPP applications were based on actual 2019 payrolls and were calculated correctly. The vast majority of the money was used for payroll, rent and utilities as was specified in the PPP rules. The scenario created by the prosecution in the indictment is false. The only issue they had to hang their hat on was the single question they claimed she answered incorrectly. Because of this she has been lumped into the “fraudster” category as if she had falsified the payroll amounts and used the money for her own purposes. 

If the IRS and SBA had investigated they would have seen the truth and assessed moneys accordingly. Instead the FBI and U S Attorney got involved and created false scenarios and cherry picked facts to support them.

In  this case the sentence was “ by the book “ based on the plea agreement.  It’s now clear that the plea agreement doesn’t accurately reflect the  circumstances in this case. It also appears that it doesn’t appear to be  in the best interests of the Government.

Jamie  McGowen is the mother of a teenage son and the sole support of her  family. Her husband has worked sporadically over the last 15 years. He  has never made over $30,000 in any one year and many years his income  was zero. Jamie is employed by her fathers CPA firm in California and  also runs the companies office in Las Vegas Nevada. She splits her time  between the two locations. If she is incarcerated this source of income  will cease. Her husband has no saleable skills to earn enough money to  stay in their apartment. Any lengthy stay will probably cause the Las  Vegas office to close. This will not only eliminate her primary source  of income but will also cause five other employees to lose their jobs.  The clients who rely on the business for bookkeeping, payroll and other  small business consulting services will have to look elsewhere for these  services. Las Vegas is a difficult city to find quality professional  services at a reasonable price.

If  she is required to spend three years in prison she will leave with her  skills diminished making it much more difficult to make a living at that  time. Her income will be much lower thus her ability to repay the  financial penalty will be limited. The Judge told her that once she was released she would be required to start paying on the $2,000,000 penalty at the rate of $400 per month. That doesn’t make much of a dent in the balance. $4,800 per year is probably all she would be able to pay. I don’t know how much the government pays annually to keep someone  incarcerated but I’ll bet it’s more than $4,800.

If  she could  avoid incarceration it would assure that these issues would not recur because the threat of being jailed  at a later date would be hanging over head. She would remain employed allowing her to continue to support her son and give her the income to  pay substantially more than the $400 monthly minimum. This money would be coming in during the time she would have been incarcerated and earning zero.

Does the government need 37 months of her life to provide a deterrent to her and others? I don’t believe so. This process began for her in November 2022 and just culminated two weeks ago. She has been under stress for two and  one half years. The stress has negatively impacted her health but she set that aside and provided outstanding service to her clients no matter how bad she felt. She interacts with small business clients on a daily basis.

It appears to me that it doesn’t help anyone to incarcerate her. The government loses the cost of keeping her for three years and also loses the money she could pay against the penalty during the three years she would have been incarcerated, This would be much more than the $400 per  month minimum. The government would also lose the deterrent to the Las Vegas small business clients that she advises. She carefully reads every line of the documents she assists them with to be sure that they don’t run into the same problems that she has encountered.