Artist gets 6 months in jail for tax evasion

BOISE – An Idaho landscape artist whose work is in the collections of billionaire potato baron J.R. Simplot and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen will spend the next six months in jail for federal tax evasion.

Once Burley resident John Horejs is freed, he’ll be on supervised release, half of it with electronic monitoring, according to his sentence Tuesday in U.S. District Court. His wife, Elaine Horejs, was sentenced to five years of probation and six months in home detention with electronic monitoring.

Both acknowledged evading more than $170,000 in federal income taxes, and “obstructing or impeding the due administration of the internal revenue laws.”

According to court documents, the pair falsely claimed they weren’t U.S. citizens, filed false trust documents and falsely claimed paintings that the Internal Revenue Service seized through a tax lien were owned by a trust.