Missouri Man Gets 51 Months for Skipping Payroll Taxes While Running Payment Companies

A Missouri man was sentenced on October 5, 2026 to 51 months in prison after being found guilty of avoiding employment taxes owed to the Internal Revenue Service through companies he owned and operated. For high-risk payment operators, the useful detail is not the casino spending; it is the familiar pattern of a payments business using customer flows and corporate accounts as a personal ATM until the tax bill catches up.

1. US Attorney’s Office for the District of Kansas identified the defendant as Ephantus Mwangi, a 48-year-old Kenyan national. He ran True Payment Solutions, Inc., a Kansas-based business that sold credit-card processing services and card readers to merchants, and True POS Solutions, Inc., which operated the same kind of services.
2. Between 2017 and 2018, Mwangi withheld an estimated $331,404.33 from the IRS for True Payment Solutions. Separately, between 2016 and 2019, he transferred more than $1.5 million from his corporate bank accounts to his personal accounts. The US government says the total missing tax contributions came to $1.5 million.
3. According to the case details, Mwangi spent money on long gambling sessions at casinos, sometimes for 10 or 12 hours at a time. He also bought luxury vehicles including a Cadillac Escalade, two Range Rovers, two Mercedes, and a Lexus. That is the kind of spending trail prosecutors like: easy to describe, hard to explain.
4. True Payment Solutions employed around 20 to 30 people at the time of the offenses. Mwangi had been scheduled to be sentenced on April 27, 2026, but failed to appear in court, became a fugitive, and was later arrested at a traffic stop six weeks later after giving law enforcement a false ID and denying he was himself.
5. US District Judge Daniel D. Crabtree ordered 3 years of supervised release after prison and restitution of $1,597,835.24.

For PSPs and merchant-facing processors, the case is a reminder that payroll tax exposure can turn into a criminal matter fast, especially when a small operating company is moving money between corporate and personal accounts. The payments stack may look boring on the surface; the tax trail rarely is.