Utah-based film producer sentenced for forcibly retaking home after it was seized for tax evasion
A Utah-based film producer was sentenced last week to six years in prison after he was convicted of evading taxes and forcibly retaking his Cedar Hills home that was seized and sold at auction, allegedly using firearms and sandbags to fortify it.
For years, Paul Kenneth Cromar ran Blue Moon Productions, a freelance film production company. According to his LinkedIn profile, Cromar directed TV infomercials, worked on animated features and produced several video projects for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
But, according to court documents, Cromar didn’t pay any taxes from 1999 through 2005 — after an audit by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, or IRS, determined Cromar owed over $703,000 in taxes, interest and penalties. Over the next 10 years, Cromar did not make any payments on his debt while taking “steps to obstruct the IRS’s ability to collect his delinquent taxes,” according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
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With his debt ballooning to over $1 million, in 2019 a federal judge ordered Cromar’s Cedar Hills home to be sold at auction. Cromar, according to federal prosecutors, tried stopping the sale of his home “by filing false documents on the property’s title and with the IRS,” while intimidating potential buyers and filing several lawsuits in federal court against IRS employees.
Cromar, according to police records, refused to leave the home. Before a sale was finalized, he allegedly broke into the house and occupied it for five months. According to a 2020 probable cause affidavit filed with Provo’s Fourth District Court, Cromar “invited several members from an armed militia (to) come to his house to protect him.” The home was fortified with wooden boards and sandbags, prosecutors said, and “no trespassing” signs were placed out front.
In 2023, Cromar was convicted and sentenced in state court for burglary, a second-degree felony, and wrongful appropriation, a third-degree felony.
In June, a federal jury found Cromar guilty of tax evasion and forcibly retaking property. December 23, he was sentenced to a total of six years in prison and three years of supervised release after. As a condition of his supervised release, Cromar was ordered to pay roughly $723,028 in restitution to the U.S. government.
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