North Carolina Attorney General Jeff Jackson announced on Wednesday, October 28, that his office has secured a conviction in a felony tax fraud case out of Onslow County that will return more than $500,000 to the state. Jimmy John Brinkley pleaded guilty to three counts of embezzling state property, the Attorney General's office said in its release.
Source: North Carolina Department of Justice
Brinkley was the president, treasurer and secretary of Select Staffing and Labor of NC, Inc., an Onslow County business that provides temporary staff for labour and construction companies — the kind of firm that supplies workers to job sites and pays them through its own payroll. That position put him in direct control of the tax money the company collected, and, prosecutors said, he was the responsible person under a duty to collect it, hold it in trust and hand it over to the state.
How the money was taken
According to the Attorney General's office, the business collected withholding tax but did not pass that money on to the government in tax years 2021 and 2022, and it underreported the sales tax it collected in 2023 — embezzling a total of $511,701. Withholding tax is not the company's money: it is deducted from employees' wages and held in trust for the state, which is why North Carolina treats keeping it as embezzlement of state property rather than a bookkeeping error.
The case was investigated by the North Carolina Department of Revenue's Criminal Investigations Division, and it was prosecuted by the Special Prosecutions Section of the North Carolina Department of Justice. That combination — revenue agents building the file, the Attorney General's own prosecutors taking it to court — is the route the state uses for its largest tax-fraud cases.
"This defendant broke the law and pocketed taxpayer money," said Attorney General Jeff Jackson. "I'm grateful to our prosecutors for bringing him to justice and winning back this money for the state. My office will continue working to protect the people of North Carolina from fraud."
A case that began with an arrest in January
Wednesday's guilty plea closes a case that became public at the start of the year. In January 2026, the Department of Revenue announced that Brinkley, then 49 and of Swansboro, had been arrested on felony tax charges filed by the department. The indictments alleged that he aided and abetted the business in embezzling approximately $511,701 in North Carolina withholding tax between January 1, 2021, and December 31, 2023, while he was a responsible person of the company, under a duty to collect, hold in trust and remit the tax to the Department of Revenue.
At that stage he appeared before a Wake County magistrate and was placed under a $50,000 secured bond, with a first appearance scheduled for January 15, 2026, in Wake County Superior Court in Raleigh. This week's plea replaces the trial that case was heading towards: instead of a jury deciding the three felony counts, Brinkley admitted them himself.
Why a staffing-company tax case matters beyond Onslow County
Temporary staffing firms sit between workers and the companies that use their labour, and they handle payroll for large numbers of hourly workers in construction and manual labour — sectors where many immigrant and working-class families, including Punjabi workers in the Carolinas' growing logistics and building trades, earn their living. When a staffing company keeps withholding tax instead of remitting it, the money at risk was already earned by those workers and deducted from their pay. The conviction returns more than half a million dollars — yaani, over $0.5 million (about five lakh dollars) — to the state that the tax was owed to.
What happens next
The Attorney General's announcement confirms the conviction and the return of more than $500,000 to North Carolina. It does not set out a custodial sentence for Brinkley, and no prison term was announced in the release; any sentencing details will come from the court record in the case. For workers and client businesses, the practical point is already settled: the three felony counts are admitted, the $511,701 figure is agreed, and the state says the money is coming back.