Westfield Woman Going to Prison for Stealing Thousands of Dollars from Health Care Agency
BUFFALO, N.Y. Jan 7 2022– U.S. Attorney Trini E. Ross announced today that Alicia Raynor, 44, of Westfield, NY, who was convicted of wire fraud and filing a false tax return, was sentenced to serve 18 months in prison and 18 months home detention by U.S. District Judge John L. Sinatra, Jr. The defendant was also ordered to pay restitution totaling $799,625.27.
Assistant U.S. Attorneys Russell T. Ippolito and John D. Fabian, who handled the case, stated that while working as the business manager for Compassion at Home, Inc., Raynor opened an account with Intuit, Inc., a payroll and payment processing service located outside the state of New York, and used the accounting software package Quickbooks to make payments into the Intuit account. Raynor then diverted money from Compassion at Home’s bank accounts to accounts that she controlled. In order to avoid detection, Raynor disguised Quickbook entries to make it appear that the payments were to Bank of America, Capital One, or Compassion at Home employees.
Between August 2015 and June 2016, Raynor fraudulently diverted approximately $238,871.58 from the company’s bank account. In addition, for the tax years 2013 through 2016, Raynor received $1,214,444 in payments from Compassion at Home that she did not report as income on her tax returns for those years. The Internal Revenue Service estimates tax owed for these tax years is $370,005.
The sentencing is the culmination of an investigation by Special Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, under the direction of Special Agent-in-Charge Steven Belongia, the Internal Revenue Service, Criminal Investigation Division, under the direction of Thomas Fattorusso, Special Agent in Charge, New York Field Office, and the Westfield Police Department, under the direction of Chief Robert Genther.
