KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The former chief financial officer at Genesys Systems Integrator was sentenced Thursday to 6 1/2 years in prison for embezzlement and tax evasion.
U.S. District Judge Roseann Ketchmark ordered Richard Scott Simkins, 57, to pay more than $4 million in restitution in addition to the prison sentence.
Simkins, an Overland Park native, pleaded guilty in January to mail fraud and filing a false tax return after embezzling $3.1 million from the company and underpaying $1 million in taxes owed to the federal government and state of Kansas.
He was ordered to repay more than $2 million to Genesys Systems Integrator, a Kansas City, Missouri-based company that “engineers and designs complex automated production systems and machinery for manufacturing.”
Simkins, who currently lives in Florida and became Genesys' CFO in 2001, also owes more than $1 million to Travelers Insurance Company plus $867,713 to the IRS and $129,131 to the Kansas Department of Revenue.
The 2012 Kansas City Business Journal CFO of the Year also “must forfeit to the government his residential property in Overland Park.”
Genesys fired Simpkins in September 2020. He had written checks on company accounts to pay personal expenses for himself and another former employee, Cheryl A. Rose, an accounting manager he supervised, according to federal prosecutors.
Rose, 53, of Freeman, Missouri, also pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud in a separate-but-related case. She has yet to be sentenced.
The embezzlement took place over “at least eight years” and included “hundreds of occasions,” escalating from $144,107 in 2013 to $588,717 in 2019.
Genesys paid more than $500,000 “to investigate, document and remediate Simkins’s and Rose’s embezzlement,” according to federal prosecutors.
Simkins used the money to fund travel and a lavish lifestyle.
