Tewksbury resident Joanne Dinoto was recently sentenced to over five years in jail for crimes including embezzlement from her employer, unemployment fraud, and tax fraud. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Dinoto received a 62-month prison sentence, three years of supervised release, and an order to pay a restitution amounting to $2,195,592 on November 7th, 2023.
From October 2008 to April 2020, Dinoto reportedly inflated her compensation falsely, used her employer's credit card for personal expenses, and forged checks to herself from the company's checking account. Efforts to conceal her actions included the alteration of her employer's accounting records. Despite being full-time employed at another company, Dinoto also collected unemployment benefits from the Massachusetts Department of Unemployment Assistance, using a false Social Security number for the employment and her actual Social Security number for the benefits. Moreover, Dinoto failed to report over $1 million she embezzled from an Acton-based company and received from a Wilmington-based company on her federal income tax returns between 2015 and 2020.
The case shines a particular spotlight on the issue of white-collar crime. A Cornell Law School definition describes white-collar crimes as "nonviolent, illegal activities that principally involve traditional notions of deceit, deception, concealment, manipulation, breach of trust, subterfuge, or illegal circumvention." As demonstrated by the Dinoto case, these crimes typically involve intricate strategies to evade detection.
In Dinoto's case, according to the Department of Justice, the investigation involved the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Internal Revenue Service's Criminal Investigations, and the Department of Labor, Office of Inspector General, Labor Racketeering and Fraud Investigations. Also assisting were the Acton Police Department and the Middlesex District Attorney's Office.
Dinoto's sentence, of over five years, emphasizes how seriously white-collar crime is being taken and indicates the need for more robust preventative measures. While successfully prosecuting Joanne Dinoto is indicative of the progress being made in dealing with white-collar crime.
