| FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE March 27, 2008 WWW.USDOJ.GOV/USAO/CAN |
SAN JOSE – United States Attorney Joseph P. Russoniello announced that United States District Court Judge James Ware on Monday sentenced Suzie Moy Yuen to 20 months imprisonment, followed by three years supervised release, and ordered her to pay restitution of $182,000 for her involvement in an embezzlement scheme and for filing a false tax return.
Ms. Yuen, 53, of San Francisco, California, pleaded guilty on October 9, 2007 to mail fraud in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1341 and 1346 and willfully subscribing to a false tax return in violation of 26 U.S.C. § 7206(1).
According to the plea agreement, Ms. Yuen served as an executive assistant to an individual (“the victim”) for over ten years and that during that time her duties included paying the victim’s bills and recording the payments in a general ledger. To permit her to do her job, the victim, who is now 99 years old, had given Ms. Yuen signature authority over two of his checking accounts. Ms. Yuen acknowledged that, between 1999 and 2003, she fraudulently used the victim’s checking accounts to pay her own personal credit card bills and made false entries in the general ledger to conceal her fraud. Yuen admitted to embezzling over $1.4 million.
Ms. Yuen further admitted that she knowingly included false information in her federal income tax returns for the 1999 to 2003 tax years in that, for each of those years, she failed to include the income she had embezzled from her employer. In particular, Ms. Yuen omitted from her 1999 return approximately $127,000 she had stolen from the victim during that year. Ms. Yuen similarly failed to report her embezzled proceeds for each of calendar years 2000 through 2003 – resulting in a total of approximately $1,417,300 in fraudulent income. In all, Ms. Yuen owed the IRS, excluding interest and penalties, a total of $492,646.
Ms. Yuen was originally indicted on April 5, 2006 by a federal grand jury sitting in San Jose. She was originally charged with seven counts of mail fraud and five counts of subscribing to a false tax return.
Joseph A. Fazioli is the Assistant United States Attorney who is prosecuting the case with the assistance of Legal Assistants Jeanne Carstensen and Tracie Andersen. The prosecution is the result of a year-and-a-half investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and IRS Criminal Investigation.
Further Information:
Case #:CR 06-00238 JWA copy of this press release may be found on the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s website at www.usdoj.gov/usao/can.
Electronic court filings and further procedural and docket information are available at https://ecf.cand.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/login.pl.
Judges’ calendars with schedules for upcoming court hearings can be viewed on the court’s website at www.cand.uscourts.gov.
All press inquiries to the U.S. Attorney’s Office should be directed to Joshua Eaton at (415) 436-6958 or by email at Josh.Eaton@usdoj.gov.