Office manager in Georgia overpaid herself for a decade, feds say. Now she owes $1.2M
The longtime office and payroll manager at a medical practice in Georgia accused of embezzling funds to pay her mortgage and credit card debt was sentenced to prison Monday.
Shirley Ann Taylor, 65, was given two years and nine months in prison during a federal sentencing hearing in the Southern District of Georgia, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Taylor was also ordered to pay $1.16 million in restitution.
“Shirley Ann Taylor violated the trust of her employer and fellow employees to enrich herself at the company’s expense,” Acting U.S. Attorney David H. Estes said in a news release. “Thanks to the vigilance of a fellow employee, she’s now being held accountable for her thefts.”
Taylor is from Gibson, Georgia, just outside of Augusta. From 2006 to 2020, prosecutors said she worked at Augusta Lung Associates LLP, a medical practice specializing in pulmonary care near the South Carolina border.
Taylor couldn’t be reached by McClatchy News for comment on Tuesday, but defense attorney Mike Millians said she has “accepted responsibility for her actions.”
According to court documents, Taylor’s job duties at the medical practice included maintaining the accounting books and overseeing payroll.
Within a year of being hired, Taylor began inflating her own pay and writing checks from the practice’s bank accounts to herself, prosecutors said. Some of the checks went to paying off her Citibank credit card and mortgage payments on her house, according to the government, while others were deposited directly into her personal bank accounts.
Taylor was arrested last year after taking medical leave in November 2019, according to The August Chronicle. Her replacement took over in February 2020 and discovered Taylor “had given herself salary increases over a 10-year period totaling at least $553,342,” the newspaper reported.
She was also accused of increasing her daughter’s pay as a secretary at the office.
Taylor waived her right to an indictment and pleaded guilty to nine counts of wire fraud earlier this year. As part of the agreement, prosecutors said, she accepted responsibility for taking a minimum of $550,000 from the medical practice.
But the amount of restitution she owed wouldn’t be limited to those counts outlined in the plea agreement, the government said.
Prosecutors recommended Taylor be sentenced at the low end of the recommended guidelines, citing in part her willingness to accept responsibility and plead guilty. She will also have to serve three years of supervised release after her prison sentence.
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