Dispensary Founder Pleads Guilty to $1.2M Federal Tax Evasion Scheme

On May 13, 2025, Jennifer Brunenkant — a 68-year-old Washington, D.C. entrepreneur and founder of Herbal Alternatives II, LLC, described by the business itself as the first woman-owned medical cannabis dispensary licensed in the District of Columbia — pleaded guilty before U.S. District Court Judge Loren L. AliKhan to one federal count of attempting to evade or defeat tax after a 19-count indictment was returned on March 6, 2025, by IRS Criminal Investigation's Washington D.C. office. Across tax years 2017 through 2021, Brunenkant failed to file federal income tax returns and failed to remit more than $1.2 million in federal obligations tied to Herbal Alternatives II, including approximately $800,000 in individual income taxes and roughly $130,000 in employment taxes withheld directly from employee paychecks and never forwarded to the IRS. To conceal the failure, she annually attested on sworn D.C. Unincorporated Business Franchise Tax Forms that her federal returns had been filed, and repeated that false claim to law enforcement in a July 2023 interview. The government will seek more than $1.2 million in restitution at sentencing scheduled for November 20, 2025, with a statutory maximum of five years on the evasion count. Among the most direct victims: the dispensary's own employees, whose federal tax accounts may not reflect the withholding their pay stubs claimed, leaving workers whose wages were already docked facing a government ledger that shows nothing was ever received on their behalf.