What is embezzlement?
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Embezzlement describes when someone illegally moves money or property from a person or entity’s holdings into their own.
Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute describes it as the “fraudulent taking of personal property by someone to whom it was entrusted. Most often associated with the misappropriation of money.”
It includes when the person reappropriates the money to a third party after initially taking it for themselves, according to the institute’s definition.
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In a recent high-value case of embezzlement, a Vermont man was sentenced on Tuesday to more than four years in prison after pleading guilty to wire fraud in a scheme to embezzle $1.2 million from payroll clients, federal prosecutors said.
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Ryan Wall, 42, who now lives in Florida, was indicted by a federal grand jury in Rutland in 2019 on charges of wire fraud and possessing firearms as an unlawful user of narcotics.
Wall was the only employee of TSBS Payroll, a payroll processing business in West Lebanon, New Hampshire, that provided services to 35 people, businesses and nonprofits in Vermont and New Hampshire. TSBS received regular funds from clients to provide payroll checks to workers and tax withholdings to be paid to state and federal tax authorities, prosecutors said.
From March 2012 to September 2018, Wall misappropriated part of the money that was supposed to go toward tax withholding by issuing payroll checks to himself and hundreds of checks to a third party who helped get him illegal prescription opiates, heroin and crack cocaine, the U.S. attorney’s office said.
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Some of the victims suffered bankruptcy, loss of business or delayed retirement, the U.S. attorney’s office said. A phone message was left with Wall’s public defender, David McColgin.
The judge ordered Wall to serve two years supervised release after his prison term and to pay back 18 victims a total of $470,000.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.