A bookkeeper for an unidentified Iowa trucking company has been sentenced to two years in federal prison after pleading guilty to stealing more than $450,000 from her employer.
The actual charge that Leann Marie Rouse pleaded guilty to was mail fraud. Two other charges in her original indictment were dismissed as part of the plea agreement.
Rouse, 51, pleaded guilty in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Iowa before her case could go to trial.
The trucking company is not identified by name in any of the legal documents connected to the case, except to note that it was located in Traer, Iowa, a small town about 60 miles northwest of Cedar Rapids. In the indictment of Rouse, handed down in March 2023, her employer is identified only as Company 1.
According to the indictment, the embezzlement started sometime in 2015 and continued through “at least” Aug. 20, 2020.
Rouse, according to the indictment, “issued unauthorized checks from [her employer’s] bank account, either depositing all or a portion of the unauthorized funds into her own personal bank account or taking in cash all or a portion of the unauthorized funds.”
The statement issued by the U.S. attorney on the sentencing said the amount stolen was $453,672.68.
Rouse, according to the indictment, was able to avoid detection for those five years “by issuing the unauthorized checks in her name and then using [the company’s] financial accounting software to reflect that the unauthorized funds were business expenditures related to various entities that did business with [the company.]”
Rouse has been free on bond and is to surrender to authorities for her prison term at an undisclosed date. After her two-year sentence is complete, she will be required to serve three years of supervised release, according to the U.S. attorney’s office.
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