Woman charged in embezzlement case receives jail time, probation

The woman who pleaded guilty to theft for embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars from a local auto body company in a plea agreement last month was sentenced to a term of probation and time in jail in Yuma County Superior Court on Tuesday.

In handing down the sentence, Superior Court Judge Brandon Kinsey ordered that Laura Matus was to serve five years of supervised probation and to pay $346,000 in restitution to Dick’s Auto Rebuilders, located at 201 W. 24th St., where she had worked for 34 years as the office manager before being fired.

As a condition of that probation, Matus, who was represented by attorney Richard Edgar, was also sentenced to serve 365 days in jail at the Yuma County Detention Center.

Matus pleaded guilty to the theft charge on May 15 as part of a plea agreement with prosecutors. In doing so, she had to admit that from Jan. 2015 through Dec. 17, 2018, she embezzled more than $100,000 from the company by writing checks to herself and making unauthorized cash withdrawls.

According to court records in December 2017, Linda Rautenberg, who is the wife of Warren Rautenberg, the owner of Dick’s Auto Rebuilders, became suspicious that Matus might be stealing from the company after she went to pick up her dry cleaning and was given items that belonged to her, such as comforters and home goods.

While employed at Dick’s, Matus was given a leased vehicle to drive. The company paid her cellphone bill and the dry cleaning of her work attire, in addition to her salary.

When Linda Rautenberg started looking into the checking account, in which she is a signee, she discovered that a substantial number of checks had been made out to Matus, when she was only allotted five checks a month.

She went on to discover that Matus had been writing checks to herself throughout the month, sometimes even multiple checks in one day. None of the checks were for less than $500.

Linda Rautenberg fired Matus in December 2017. When Matus’ desk was cleared out, a stack of prewritten checks was found underneath her desktop calendar already made out to her.

In January 2018, Linda Rautenberg reported the embezzlement to the Yuma Police Department, explaining that her husband had given control over their business’ bookkeeping, payroll, tax preparation and tax deposits to Matus. She added that in all of those years her husband never checked into the management of those accounts.

She also informed police that she had noticed that Matus had made several high-end purchases, including a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and other offroad vehicles. She had also made several visits to a casino.

An ongoing audit of the company’s accounts revealed that, from 2016 and 2017, Matus had been using the company’s business account to make payments on her own credit card, write checks to family members, and buy groceries.

The accounts showed that Matus had overpaid herself $108,000 in cash and checks, and that she was making $2,300 a week in salary. She had also made $150,000 in payments on her own credit card. It is believed that she had been stealing from the company for years.

During the audit it was also revealed that Matus had prepared the company’s 2015 IRS tax returns, along with those of several other employees, and charged the business $700. In addition to not listing herself as the preparer, she also did the returns while at work.

The Rautenbergs also had to sell property they owned to pay the City of Yuma $39,000 in back taxes so they wouldn’t lose the business. Matus had failed to pay taxes for six years and hid the notices.

When Matus was interviewed May 10, she told Yuma police that she had been fired for “taping into the tills.” She also stated that in addition to her weekly salary, she had other verbal agreements with the company’s owner that no one else knew about.

She continued by saying that the owner of the company had promised it to her, so she believed that it would be hers one day.

She, at one point, also told investigators that she had endured many years of verbal abuse from the Rautenbergs and that it had caused her self-esteem to plummet.

She was arrested after the interview and booked into Yuma County jail.