A 46-year-old Georgetown woman was sentenced Wednesday in federal court in Boston for embezzling more than $419,000 from her employer.
Michelle Higson was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Richard G. Stearns to 27 months in prison, with five years of supervised release. She was also ordered to pay back the entire amount. Higson pleaded guilty during September 2019 to four counts of bank fraud.
In 2013, Higson began working as a part-time bookkeeper for a Wilmington company. From 2015 until her termination in 2018, Higson stole a series of the company’s checks, made them payable to herself or to her husband and forged her employers’ signatures. Higson cashed and deposited the checks for her own personal use. To conceal her activity, she also falsified entries in the company’s books to make it appear payments were made to actual vendors. On several occasions, Higson inflated her pay, falsified the number of hours she worked and collected more money than she actually earned.
Higson was also sentenced separately for violating her supervised release following her 2017 conviction related to embezzling more than $60,000 from a Rowley-based company. U.S. District Judge Denise J. Casper sentenced Higson to an additional six months in prison for the supervised release violation.