Former KCPD officer pleads guilty to filing false tax return in KC payday loan scheme
A former agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration, who was also a former Kansas City police officer, pleaded guilty Monday to filing a false tax return as part of a payday loan scheme, according to a news release from the U.S Attorney for the Western District of Missouri.
Patrick Scot Witcher, 57, of Wichita Falls, Texas, pleaded guilty Monday in federal court in Kansas City to one count of filing a false federal income tax return.
In his plea, Witcher admitted that he assisted five people in establishing, operating and managing of various payday lending businesses.
One of the those he helped was Joel Tucker, a Prairie Village man with deep ties to Kansas City’s payday lending industry. Tucker was sentenced in 2021 to 12.5 years in prison for dodging taxes and for a scheme that targeted consumers to pay debts they often didn’t owe.
Tucker is the brother of Scott Tucker, who is serving more than 16 years for running what authorities called an exploitative payday loan business that ripped off more than 4 million borrowers. In March, Tucker was also sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to pay $40 million in restitution for filing a false fraudulent tax return. That sentence is to run concurrently with his previous sentence.
In his plea, Witcher admitted to filing false federal tax returns that included more than $1 million in unreported income between 2016 and 2018 from payday lending businesses. Those businesses supposedly operated outside the United States and then on Native American reservations, when in reality the operations were based in the Kansas City metro area, according to the district attorney’s office.
Witcher, who was employed with the Kansas City Police Department from April 1991 to September 2002, is facing up to three years in federal prison without parole. A sentencing hearing has not been set.
