PEORIA — A former accounting manager for Bard Optical was Monday indicted in U.S. District Court on charges she stole nearly $5 million from the company’s coffers to spend on personal items.
Gayle A. Rentsch was charged with four counts of wire fraud, six counts of money laundering, three counts of criminally deriving property and three counts of identity theft for a scheme in which she took $4.8 million from the company’s bank accounts over an eight-year period between 2016 and 2024, according to court documents.
According to the initial indictment filed in U.S. District Court for the Central District of Illinois, Rentsch, beginning in October 2016 through June 2024, engaged in a scheme to defraud Bard by using company credit cards to make direct payments to herself and by issuing credit cards to herself, utilizing accounts through Square and PayPal.
In addition, she was also accused of using her position as the accounting manager to change the bank information for two vendors with which Bard did business, in addition to supplying false information to the company’s outside accounting firm, making it appear as if Busey Bank – home to the company’s primary business accounts – provided those statements when it did not.
As a result, Rentsch acquired more than $4 million to spend on things such as boats, lawn mowers, cars and other items, also using the funds to pay for a gambling habit, the indictment said. Among the specific items purchased by Rentsch included a 2021 GMC Sierra, a Spartan zero-turn mower, a 2016 Polaris Ranger side-by-side and a 2024 Legend utility trailer.
Prosecutors are asking that the court require Rentsch to forfeit the $4 million she received as a result of the scheme, along with the vehicles she purchased.
During arraignment Monday, Rentsch pleaded not guilty on all charges and was released from custody with conditions, such as avoiding any contact with victims or witnesses in the investigation or employees of Bard Optical.
Bard owner Mick Hall said that he learned of the deception on June 19, 2024, going to Busey to determine the issue the very next day. He said he found that Rentsch had conducted ECH transfers to pay off credit card bills, along with forged checks and credit card payments that made it appear as if Bard was paying her own company.
He accused Rentsch of doctoring bills sent to Bard in order to make it appear as if they came from regular vendors to the company rather than to herself. She was fired from the company shortly thereafter, with the accounting firm of CliftonLarsonAllen being enlisted to conduct a forensic audit of the company’s books, Hall said.
They found that much of the money that was taken was through the credit card transactions, with the accountants sifting through each of the bills to identify the suspicious charges and determine which were fraudulent.
“She was using corporate credit cards on a gambling site,” Hall told the Journal Star. “That racked up a huge amount. The other money that she was paying herself out of the company, she was also using it at gambling locations.”
Later, the FBI and IRS got involved in the investigation, with both each confirming the findings from the forensic audit.
“They confirmed all of the same information that the accounting firm did,” Hall said. “They had access to information that we didn’t have about some other uses of the credit card. Because they’re the government and they had access to that type of information, the $4.8 million is the number that their investigators came up with.”
Hall said that Bard has revamped internal controls to allow for greater transparency of accounting information within the department that Rentsch worked for. Any member of the team will now be able to see anything that could rise to the level of fraud and be able to report it to their superiors.
“We never suspected anything of her,” Hall said. “I would have told you she was a very trusted member of our accounting department. We had no reason to suspect that she was doing what she was doing. As a family business, maybe we over-trusted too much with people in that department and unfortunately, that trust was broken.”
Even with the loss of nearly $5 million, Hall said the company remains in good financial order.
“Luckily, we are a strong financial business, so this was not crippling like it would have other companies,” Hall said.
This article originally appeared on Journal Star: Former employee accused of stealing nearly $5 million from Bard Optical
Reporting by Zach Roth, Peoria Journal Star / Journal Star
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