Delco mushroom farmer’s four-year prison sentence ‘should send a loud message to anyone even contemplating tax fraud,’ says U.S. Attorney

Employees of a defunct mushroom farm in Delaware County will soon get their profit shares, following the conviction of the farm’s owner on tax fraud charges, the U.S. Department of Labor announced last week.

Donna Fecondo was the owner of Joseph Silvestri & Son, which operated a mushroom farm in Garnet Valley. The business ceased operations in 2019, according to the Labor Department, but Fecondo didn’t distribute the profit-sharing plan assets to employees.

The 67 plan participants will get their distributions, which total $597,351, through an independent administrator.

The farm owner was indicted on tax charges in 2022 and pleaded guilty. She was sentenced to 46 months in federal prison last month and ordered to pay nearly $600,000 in restitution.

From 2013 to 2016, Fecondo collected payroll taxes from workers’ weekly paychecks but did not remit that money to the government, federal prosecutors said.

She filed tax forms for those years later, in 2017, but did not pay for those tax years. The government said she should have paid more than $1.25 million for 2013 to 2016.

She also failed to file personal income tax and corporate tax returns for 2015 and 2016, prosecutors said.

“We’re in the middle of tax season when a lot of people are grumbling about what they owe the IRS — but they still go ahead and pay what they’re supposed to,” U.S. Attorney Jacqueline C. Romero said in a statement last month. “Her nearly four-year prison sentence should send a loud message to anyone even contemplating tax fraud that it will wind up costing them dearly, in the end.”

Fecondo will also forfeit her own share of the account to go toward her paying her restitution. Her lawyer, Hope Lefeber, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.