Beaver woman sentenced to federal prison in $1 million tax embezzlement

A Beaver County woman was sentenced Tuesday to a year and a day in a federal prison for stealing more than $1 million in tax payments, according to federal prosecutors.

Jeanne Bowser, 63, of Center, was ordered to spend three years on supervised release after the prison term. She pleaded guilty in April to charges of wire fraud and filing false income tax returns.

She was the elected tax collector for Center and collected tax payments for Central Valley School District, according to court filings. Prosecutors said she wrote checks to herself from an account containing tax payments and deposited cash payments into her own bank account between December 2011 and about August 2019.

Investigators said Bowser submitted fraudulent tax returns between 2014 and 2019.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Lee Karl said in a sentencing memorandum that Bowser breached the community’s trust.

“For at least eight years, she stole taxpayers’ funds hundreds of times, and only stopped because she got caught,” he wrote. “This was not a spur-of-the-moment mistake. It was a long, well-planned course of embezzlement and lies.”

Defense attorney Francis C. Rapp Jr. pointed to the drug addictions of family members as Bowser’s motivation to steal the money in an effort to get them into treatment and pay off drug dealers. She sought a sentence of home confinement.

“… Jeanne did not use the funds taken from the school district and the township to support herself or some extravagant lifestyle,” Rapp wrote in a sentencing memorandum. “Rather, she turned to that source of funds only after totally exhausting her own resources to keep her family safe.”

Bowser was ordered to pay $1.3 million in restitution to the township, school district, insurance companies and IRS. She is expected to report April 22 to begin serving her sentence.