SAN JOSE – LAWFUEL – The Legal Newswire – United States Attorney Scott N. Schools announced that Suzie Moy Yuen pleaded guilty last week to mail fraud and to filing a false tax return. The plea was entered before United States District Judge James Ware.
In pleading guilty, Ms. Yuen, 53, of San Francisco, acknowledged that she had served as an executive assistant to Theodore Rosenberg for over ten years and that during that time her duties included paying Mr. Rosenberg’s bills and recording the payments in a general ledger. To permit her to do her job, Mr. Rosenberg, who is now almost 98 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 Mr. Rosenberg’s checking accounts to pay her own personal credit card bills and made false entries in the general ledger to conceal her fraud. The amount she embezzled was 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 admitted that she willfully omitted from her 1999 return approximately $127,000 she had stolen from Mr. Rosenberg during that year. Ms. Yuen agreed that she similarly failed to report her embezzled proceeds for each of calendar years 2000 through 2003 – a total of approximately $1,417,300 in illicit income over the five-year period. Ms. Yuen admitted that she 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, in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1341 and 1346, and five counts of subscribing to a false tax return, in violation of 26 U.S.C. § 7206(1).
Ms. Yuen is scheduled to be sentenced on January 14, 2008 before Judge James Ware in San Jose. The maximum statutory penalty for mail fraud is 30 years imprisonment and a $250,000 fine, plus restitution. The maximum penalty for filing a false tax return is 3 years imprisonment, a $250,000 fine, plus restitution. However, any sentence would be imposed by the court after consideration of the United States Sentencing Guidelines and the federal statute governing the imposition of a sentence, 18 U.S.C. § 3553.
Carlos Singh is the Assistant U.S. Attorney who is prosecuting the case with the assistance of Tracey Andersen. The prosecution is the result of a year-and-a-half investigation by the FBI and IRS.
Further Information:
Case #:CR-06-00238-JW
A 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 Natalya LaBauve at (415) 436-7055 or by email at Natalya.LaBauve@usdoj.gov.
