From staff reports Deanna Rachel Long, 59, was sentenced in Tulsa’s federal district court to serve a year and a day in prison for bank fraud and tax evasion, and was ordered to pay almost $375,000 in restitution and taxes.
Long was hired in 2012 to serve as a manager at the Family Crisis and Counseling Center in Bartlesville. The FCCC is a nonprofit agency “devoted to reducing and eliminating violence in domestic relationships through intervention and prevention.”
Long was entrusted to handle many aspects of FCCC’s accounting and finance functions, including recordkeeping for the financial books, paying bills and preparing checks for business expenses.
Within two years of being hired, she began embezzling money to fuel her gambling addiction and to “pay for a lifestyle that cost more” than she could afford from her “legitimate income.”
Court documents show that she embezzled more than a quarter of a million dollars from FCCC by writing checks from the counseling center’s bank account, payable to herself. Additionally, she failed to report the illegal income to the Internal Revenue Service and failed to file tax returns for tax years 2014 through 2022.
After leaving FCCC, Long, of Bartlesville, further filed false tax forms with her new employer, claiming numerous exemptions to which she was not entitled to avoid any personal income taxes being deducted from her paychecks.
State court records show Long has been arrested numerous times for passing bogus checks, pleaded guilty to bogus check charges and pleaded guilty twice for embezzling from two previous employers. Besides her prison sentence, Long was ordered to pay $278,257 in restitution to FCCC plus $96,622 to the IRS.