A 39-year-old Kent woman pleaded guilty to wire fraud and tax fraud charges for a 10-year embezzlement scheme in which she stole more than $2.5 million from her Everett employer.
Christin Guillory, an accounting manager at an Everett-based manufacturing company, entered the plea Thursday, May 11 in U.S. District Court in Seattle, according to a news release from the U.S. Department of Justice.
Guillory stole the money by transferring funds to accounts Guillory set up in the names of fake companies and then routing the funds to her own bank accounts. Guillory faces up to 20 years in prison when sentenced by U.S. District Judge Ricardo S. Martinez on Aug. 11, although prosecutors under the plea agreement will recommend no more than three years, five months in prison. Martinez will consider a number of statutory factors before determining the appropriate sentence, according to the Department of Justice.
According to the plea agreement, in April 2013, Guillory set up an account with payment processor Square that used a display name that made it appear it was an account of a commercial shipping company. Between 2014 and 2019, Guillory secretly paid $1.69 million to that account and then transferred the money to her own bank accounts. She made false entries in the company books to conceal the theft.
In 2019, Guillory stopped using Square for her fraud and instead used two PayPal accounts. She gave one of the PayPal accounts a display name similar to that of her employer. For the second account, she used the name of a shipping company with which she had no affiliation.
In 2020 and 2021, she caused the transfer of $604,000 to the PayPal accounts and made false accounting entries to cover her tracks. She then transferred the bulk of the money for her own use. Becoming more brazen, between August and November 2021, Guillory transferred $247,000 directly from company accounts to her own bank accounts. Again, she made fraudulent accounting entries and reused legitimate invoices to make it appear the payments were for appropriate business purposes. In all, Guillory made at least 867 secret transactions using interstate wires that totaled $2.53 million.
The scheme was detected when a financial institution reported irregularities.
Guillory is also charged with making a false tax return for failing to report the more than $2.5 million in income she embezzled. For example, for the tax year 2019, Guillory represented that her income was $38,022, but failed to report the $615,392 in income she received that year from her embezzlement. In all, Guillory failed to pay $590,850 that she owed in taxes.
“Ms. Guillory received millions of dollars of ‘involuntary contributions’ from her employer, stolen amounts which she gave herself by abusing her position of trust within the company,” said Special Agent in Charge Bret Kressin, IRS Criminal Investigation, Seattle Field Office. “Financial and tax crime have consequences, and Ms. Guillory’s guilty plea today is a compelling reminder of that.”
According to her profile on linkedin.com, Guillory worked at Majestic Glove, a supplier of personal safety gear.
Nothing was said at the plea hearing about how Guillory spent the money and there is nothing in the public record about how the money was used, according to a Department of Justice spokesperson. How Guillory spent the money likely will be discussed at sentencing.
Wire fraud is punishable by up to 20 years in prison. Filing a false tax return is punishable by up to three years in prison.
The case was investigated by the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation unit.
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