Source: Office of United States Attorneys
ST. PAUL, Minn. – A Tower woman has been sentenced to 28 months in prison, three years of supervised release, and was ordered to pay nearly $430,000 in restitution to more than two dozen former payroll clients and the IRS, announced Acting U.S. Attorney Lisa D. Kirkpatrick.
According to court documents, Jeana Lautigar, a.k.a. Jeana Lautigar-McGowan, 58, owned and operated an accounting and payroll service headquartered in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, where she managed payroll for various small businesses. To facilitate the payroll service, Lautigar-McGowan was granted access to client bank accounts. On multiple occasions between 2016 and 2020, Lautigar-McGowan embezzled funds from her clients’ bank accounts and used the money to cover personal expenses, or to pay back money she had previously embezzled from other clients. To accomplish her scheme, Lautigar-McGowan would electronically transfer funds from a client account into an account she controlled – in an amount appearing to be consistent with clients’ payroll – and spend the money for unapproved purposes. In total, she embezzled $344,813 from her clients over a period of five years.
According to court documents and her guilty plea, on February 6, 2020, Lautigar-McGowan tried to cover her scheme by transferring money from an account she controlled and that had been funded with embezzled money into the account of another payroll client. Lautigar-McGowan also filed false income tax returns in which she failed to report the embezzled income, resulting in a $84,746 tax loss to the United States.
On September 27, 2024, Lautigar-McGowan pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court to one count of engaging in a monetary transaction in criminally derived property and one count of filing a false income tax return. She was sentenced last week by Judge Donovan W. Frank.
This case is the result of an investigation conducted by the Internal Revenue Service – Criminal Investigation.
Assistant U.S. Attorneys Robert Lewis and Esther Soria prosecuted the case.