Federal prosecutors say Single Shot’s Rory McCormick withheld taxes from employee paychecks for a decade and never sent them to the IRS. He is scheduled to enter a plea next week.
The owner of Single Shot Kitchen and Saloon on Capitol Hill has been charged with a federal tax felony after prosecutors said he withheld more than a million dollars from his employees’ paychecks over roughly a decade and never forwarded any of it to the Internal Revenue Service. The case against Ruadhri “Rory” McCormick was filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington. The restaurant, at 611 Summit Ave. E., remains open and has announced no closure.
The charge is a single count under 26 U.S.C. 7202, willfully failing to account for and pay over federal income and FICA taxes for the quarter that ended in December 2022. The statute carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison along with fines and statutory penalties. Prosecutors filed the case as a felony information rather than seeking an indictment from a grand jury, a route typically taken when a defendant has agreed to waive indictment, and McCormick is scheduled for an arraignment and plea hearing next week.
While the count itself covers one quarter, the conduct described in the filing spans 36. Prosecutors say that between the fourth quarter of 2014 and the third quarter of 2024, McCormick failed to pay over $1,027,362 that had been withheld from employees’ paychecks, along with a further $418,979 representing the employer’s own share of payroll taxes. The filing states that no quarterly employment tax returns were submitted across the entire period.
Every employer is required to withhold federal income tax and the employee portion of Social Security and Medicare from each paycheck, hold that money in trust, and remit it to the government on a quarterly schedule. Because the funds are considered held in trust, failing to pass them along is treated more seriously than an ordinary tax debt, and the government generally treats itself, rather than the workers, as the injured party in these cases. Under federal law, employees who had taxes withheld are credited for having paid them regardless of whether the employer ever forwarded the money.
The investigation was opened by IRS Criminal Investigation, which was conducting interviews in the matter as early as August 2024, roughly two years before the charge was filed. An IRS spokesperson declined to comment on the pending case. McCormick’s attorneys did not respond to requests for comment before publication.
Single Shot opened on Capitol Hill in December 2014 and marked its tenth anniversary the same month the alleged conduct ended. McCormick also holds partnership interests in Re:Public and El Grito Taqueria, and state records list him as the sole registered agent of the entity behind Single Shot. Neither of the other businesses is named or charged in the filing.
