United States v. Giang

── United States v. Giang ── Court: Court of Appeals for the First Circuit Date: April 22, 2026 Category: General United States Court of Appeals For the First Circuit No. 24-1829 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Appellee, v. LILIAN GIANG, Defendant, Appellant. APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF MASSACHUSETTS [Hon. Richard G. Stearns, U.S. District Judge] Before Montecalvo, Thompson, and Aframe, Circuit Judges. Christine DeMaso, Assistant Federal Public Defender, for appellant. Donald C. Lockhart, Assistant United States Attorney, with whom Leah B. Foley, United States Attorney, was on brief, for appellee. April 22, 2026  MONTECALVO, Circuit Judge. After a jury trial, Defendant-Appellant Lilian Giang was convicted on four counts of failure to collect or pay over employment taxes in violation of 26 U.S.C. § 7202 and one count of mail fraud under 18 U.S.C. § 1341. Her convictions stem from the operations of Able Temp Agency ("Able"), a staffing business she owned and managed. At trial, the government's witnesses testified that Able paid workers in unreported cash and submitted false payroll information to both the Internal Revenue Service and Able's workers' compensation insurer, resulting in lower tax bills and insurance premiums. On appeal, Giang challenges four aspects of her trial: (1) the admission of evidence about her alleged efforts to skirt cash-withdrawal reporting requirements by withdrawing cash in increments just below the reporting threshold, (2) the district court’s refusal to give a requested jury instruction on implicit bias, (3) the propriety of the court’s instructions regarding tax obligations and good faith and, finally, (4) the sufficiency of the evidence underpinning her mail fraud conviction. After considering each of the purported errors Giang identifies, we AFFIRM the district court. I. BACKGROUND Because this case comes to us after a jury trial, we recount the facts relevant to the appellant's sufficiency challenge in the light most favorable to the government and provide - 2 - a neutral summary of the facts relevant to any other claims. See United States v. Díaz-Rosado, 857 F.3d 116, 117 (1st Cir. 2017). A. Giang's Business Operations At the age of twenty, Lilian Giang immigrated to the United States from Vietnam in 1987 after spending time in a refugee camp in the Philippines. Giang left school in Vietnam during the seventh grade and speaks limited English. In 1999, Giang and her then-husband purchased a small store in New Hampshire, which they operated together until their divorce around 2013. After the couple divorced and sold the store, Giang supported their three children on her own. In 2015, Giang founded Able, a temporary employment business based in Quincy, Massachusetts. Able provided short-term laborers to client companies throughout the state. Many of Able's workers were, like Giang, Vietnamese immigrants. The client companies paid Able, and Able was responsible for paying the workers and handling the attendant payroll tax obligations. Giang personally managed most aspects of Able’s operations, including job placements, worker transportation, and payroll coordination. She relied on her daughter, Mi Giang Kul, who had formal training in accounting, to enter payroll data into Able's Intuit accounting system. That accounting system generated worker pay