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Trucking Company Comptroller Sentenced in Multi-Million Dollar Theft

The former comptroller for a Missouri carrier has been sentenced after being convicted for stealing $4.9 million from his employer.

by Staff
September 24, 2014
Trucking Company Comptroller Sentenced in Multi-Million Dollar Theft

 

3 min to read


The former comptroller for a Missouri carrier has been sentenced after being convicted for stealing $4.9 million from his employer.

David VanWinkle, was sentenced last week by a U.S. District Judge in Missouri to five years and 10 months in federal prison without parole.

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The court also ordered VanWinkle to forfeit to the government $4,911,621, a 2013 Holland tractor, a 2007 Hummer H3, a 2012 John Deere seed drill, and $28,086 that was seized from various bank accounts.

VanWinkle worked for Frontier Leasing Incorporated in Joplin, Missouri, where he had been employed for 22 years and had a close, personal relationship with the owner, according to FBI, which investigated the case along with the IRS.

On February 28, VanWinkle pleaded guilty to wire fraud, money laundering and failure to pay taxes. He admitted that he stole $4,911,621 from FLI between June 2008 and December 2013, which he spent on personal expenses and gambling.

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According to court documents, VanWinkle’s embezzlement caused severe financial distress for the company, its owners and its 100 employees. While VanWinkle was stealing millions, FLI and its employees were voluntarily taking pay cuts to ensure that this business would not close its doors, according to the FBI. As the comptroller for FLI, the government’s sentencing memorandum states, VanWinkle would have been acutely aware of the ramifications of his greed and its direct impact on FLI’s employees and their families.

VanWinkle’s fraud was detected after the owners of FLI were contacted due to the company’s failure to pay employee taxes because VanWinkle had stolen the money that was intended for that purpose, according to court documents. He was responsible for collecting payroll taxes for FLI and paying over those payroll taxes to the IRS. VanWinkle withheld those taxes but failed to turn them over to the IRS. He admitted that he collected, but failed to pay over, a total of $435,896 in federal tax, Social Security and FICA withheld from FLI employees’ paychecks.

Federal agents then began investigating unusual deposits VanWinkle made into his business accounts for two businesses, VanWinkle Accounting and VanWinkle Farms, according to the FBI.

VanWinkle, acting as the comptroller for FLI, received payments from customers in the form of checks. He deposited some of those checks into FLI’s legitimate business accounts, but deposited others into another, secret checking account under the name of FLI that VanWinkle had opened at another bank. VanWinkle was the sole person on this secret account, no one else was aware that FLI had the account. VanWinkle was not authorized to open an account or deposit any of FLI’s customer payment checks into the account. He admitted that he withdrew money from the secret bank account to deposit into his business accounts.

VanWinkle also failed to report the embezzled funds from FLI on his personal income tax returns he filed with the Internal Revenue Service for the years 2008, 2009 and 2010. VanWinkle did not file income tax returns for the years 2011 and 2012, and therefore did not report the embezzled funds during these years, either.

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