Wetumpka Woman Sentenced To Prison For Embezzling Money From A Doctor’s Office And Falsifying Her Tax Returns

             Montgomery, Alabama – On Wednesday, May 19, 2021, Stephanie Hafley, also known as Stephanie A. Rooney, 53, from Wetumpka, Alabama, was sentenced to 22 months in prison for embezzling nearly $400,000.00 from her employer and failing to pay taxes, announced Acting U.S. Attorney Sandra J. Stewart. In addition to her prison sentence, Hafley was ordered to serve three years of supervised release and to pay $393,134.02 restitution to the victim, and $108,610.00 to the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS). There is no parole in the federal system.

            According to court records and statements made in open court, from at least 2012 through 2016, Hafley was the office manager of Medical Care Associates (MCA) in Prattville, Alabama where she was in charge of handling the company’s finances. These duties included paying the office’s bills, making bank deposits of revenue generated by MCA, making entries to the general ledger, preparing the business payroll ledger and making the payment of employment taxes to the Alabama Department of Revenue and the IRS. In 2015, another individual associated with MCA noticed suspicious activity in some of the office’s financial statements. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the IRS began to investigate and soon developed Hafley as a potential suspect. The investigation ultimately revealed that Hafley wrote checks from MCA’s bank account and deposited them into her personal account. She also wrote checks to cash from one of MCA’s accounts and used MCA funds from another bank to pay her personal credit card debt. Unsurprisingly, Hafley did not report any of this stolen income on her federal income tax returns. Over a four-year period, records indicate that Hafley embezzled approximately $393,000.00 from MCA. Hafley’s failure to report the stolen income resulted in an aggregate tax loss of over $100,000.00.

            Based on the information gathered during the investigation, Hafley was charged on November 1, 2019 with two counts of bank larceny and one count of including false information on a federal tax return. An individual is guilty of bank larceny if it is proven he or she stole money or property that was in the care, custody, or control of a bank insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). Hafley pleaded guilty to the charges on May 26, 2020. During the plea hearing, she admitted to stealing MCA funds that were being held in accounts at two separate banks.

            The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the IRS’s Criminal Investigations Division (IRS-CI) investigated this case. Assistant United States Attorney Brett Talley prosecuted the case.