Sentenced in April to 12 months in prison for filing a false federal tax return, Lisa Balderrama, of Cortez, has since been charged with four counts of theft by local authorities.<\/p>\n
After receiving the federal sentence, local authorities charged Balderrama, 51, with four counts of felony theft in July. Last week, she entered a guilty plea on a single theft count, which stipulates four years of supervised probation, 100 hours of community service and restitution totaling more than $302,000.<\/p>\n
Extradited from a federal facility in Phoenix, Balderrama remains in custody at the Montezuma County jail awaiting sentencing on Sept. 29.<\/p>\n
Federal investigators found that Balderrama embezzled some $280,000 in cash payments from Empire Electric customers from 2009 through 2012. She served as a customer service representative for nearly seven years.<\/p>\n
She pleaded guilty to tax fraud on Dec. 2, 2014, after failing to report a combined total income of more than $277,000 on her tax returns from 2010 to 2013. The tax loss to the IRS totaled nearly $65,000.<\/p>\n
Empire\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s insurance carrier reportedly reimbursed all losses.<\/p>\n
Balderrama previously worked at The Cortez Journal. She left in 2005.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ex-Empire rep previously sentenced in tax fraud<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5736,5735],"tags":[21,907,227,13],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-109470","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","category-news","tag-cortez","tag-embezzlement","tag-empire-electric-assoc","tag-frontpage-lead"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=109470"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109470\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=109470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=109470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=109470"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=109470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}