US District Court

CEI embezzler sentenced to 20 months

Wed, 10/29/2014 - 12:15pm

The Brunswick woman who pleaded guilty to embezzling more than $300,000 from a Wiscasset nonprofit has been sentenced to 20 months in jail.

Stacey Backman, 41, of Brunswick, was sentenced Tuesday, Oct. 28 in U.S. District Court in Portland to 20 months in prison on one count each of embezzlement from a federally funded program and tax fraud and making false statements.

Backman will have three years of supervised release for the embezzlement charge and another year for the tax fraud charge and the to will run concurrently. She was also ordered to pay $365,168 in restitution.

Backman pleaded guilty in June to the charges stemming from a January arrest. She had worked at Coastal Enterprise Inc. in Wiscasset from 2010 until her firing in January, 2014.

During that time she was found to have embezzled more than $300,000 for personal expenses. She then failed to report the money, which accounted for the tax fraud charges.

Backman originally faced up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine for the federal program charge and up to three years and a $100,000 fine on the tax fraud charges.

The case was investigated by the Wiscasset Police Department, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Office of the Inspector General, the IRS' criminal investigation division and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.