January 20, 2019. The penalties for felony embezzlement vary from state to state. Please reference the Terms of Use and the Supplemental Terms for specific information related to your state. It generally involves a person or a corporation misrepresenting their income to the IRS, so they may avoid paying their rightful taxes. This allows the prosecutor to charge the defendant with one embezzlement crime (and the judge to impose one sentence), rather than bring to trial many small embezzlement crimes. The embezzler has permission to handle the property in a certain way . function invokeftr() { }; This does not necessarily mean it has to be through employment, but any form of relationship where trust is given to someone else to watch over . The most common example is a company employee that funnels money from the company employer into a personal account. Typically, the following legal elements are required to prove the crime of embezzlement: There is a trust or fiduciary relationship between the rightful property owner and the perpetrator; The U.S. government owns the property or has an interest in the . Another example of embezzlement would be an account or bookkeeper who illegally writes a check to themselves, or withdraws money from the business bank accounts. When applicable, restitution is most often in addition to the applicable fines and prison time. In this way, embezzlement is characterized as a kind of theft that involves a breach of trust. & var links=w.document.getElementsByTagName("link");for(var i=0;i