18 months for siphoning $2M+ from Ocean County health care firm
The lawyer who admitted diverting more than $2,600,000 from an Ocean County home health care firm through his position as its in-house counsel heads to prison for a year and a half.
Matthew S. Neugeboren, 39, of Manalapan, pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud and a charge of subscribing to a false tax return for the withdrawals that took place ina seven-year span beginning in 2006, according to the office of New Jersey U.S. Attorney Paul J. Fishman.
He was also ordered to serve three years of supervised release, pay $1,404,963 in restitution to the company and send $474,814 to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
Federal prosecutors refrained from identifying the company in released information, saying only that Neugeboren paid the firm's expenses and requested checks and wire transfers from its bank accounts to his attorney trust account to do so.
Neugeboren induced the company to transfer more money than was necessary for expenses into the account, prosecutors said, and confessed to using the extra funds for gambling and other personal expenses. Investigators pegged the total at $2,644,912.
The attorney also filed a tax return in calendar 2011 that omitted $630,000 in gross income tied to the excess funds, prosecutors said.