Fake IRS agent's $55K hotel bill in Novato
Henry K. Lee, Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, January 28, 2010
(01-28) 12:50 PST NOVATO -- A woman who stalled on paying a $55,000 bill she racked up at a Novato hotel over two years falsely claimed she was an undercover Internal Revenue Service agent who was having trouble getting paid, federal authorities said.
Sherry Lynn Vertoch, 64, who has never been employed by the IRS, has been charged in U.S. District Court in San Francisco with impersonating a federal employee. She appeared in court Wednesday but did not enter a plea.
Vertoch, who lived at the Inn Marin on Entrada Drive since 2002, told hotel employees soon after her she moved in that she was working with the IRS, Special Agent John Hartman of
the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration wrote in a court affidavit.
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She paid her bills promptly until mid-2008, when the payments became sporadic, Marshall's brother, co-owner Robert Marshall, said in an interview today.
In July 2008, when her bill reached $8,000, Robert Marshall told Vertoch that he couldn't believe the IRS was "hanging her out like this," that he "could not afford to finance the Internal Revenue Service" and that "she needed to get them to pay if they are responsible for her lodging costs," Hartman wrote.
Vertoch told him that because she was a contract IRS employee, she could not be paid until the end of an investigation, the affidavit said.
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"We had been under the impression for eight years that she was a special agent with the IRS," Marshall said. "That was the only reason that we tolerated this."
He added, "I'm extremely frustrated. The real crime is, we're a local family business. We don't have deep pockets, and basically she's taken money from our children and the families of our all employees. It's tough times right now."
Read more:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/01/28/BAUS1BON5I.DTL&tsp=1#ixzz0dxnTKdcl
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