Woman Sentenced for Stealing $1 Million From New Bedford Employer

A Portsmouth, Rhode Island woman has been sentenced after admitting to stealing more than $1 million from her New Bedford-based employer and failing to pay taxes on those funds.

Fifty-year-old Barbara Levy was sentenced Tuesday in Boston Federal Court to 32-months in prison plus two years of supervised release. She was also ordered to pay $1.3 million in restitution.

In January of this year, Levy pleaded guilty to one count of bank fraud and one count of filing a false tax return.

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The U.S. Attorney's Office says Levy worked as an office manager at a New Bedford company and according to prosecutors, forged more than 11-hundred checks to herself from her employer's bank accounts and then deposited the funds into her own account or cashed them.

Levy hid her scheme by altering monthly bank statements, substituting the names of legitimate purported payees in place of her own name to make it appear as though the checks had been written for a valid purpose. Levy also failed to report the funds she embezzled on her federal income tax returns.

Information provided by U.S. Attorney's Office / District of Massachusetts