charged<\/a> by state police in Reading on March 3, also was sentenced to 18 years of probation and ordered to pay $884,966 in restitution.<\/p>\nIn a separate case in Lancaster County, Rossanese pleaded guilty in January to stealing $188,000 from Lancaster Foundry Supply Co. while she was the controller. She was sentenced by Judge Dennis E. Reinaker to three to 23 months in the county prison followed by eight years of probation and ordered to pay full restitution.<\/p>\n
Further details of the Lancaster case were unavailable.<\/p>\n
According to court records in the Berks case:<\/p>\n
On March 30, 2025, Tim Meade reported to troopers in Reading that Rossanese, his former employee, was suspected of embezzling money from CertaPro Painters of Reading, a house-painting business Meade owns with his wife, Jill.<\/p>\n
A subcontractor contacted the company, suggesting officials look into their accounts because their company discovered more than $200,000 missing through an audit, Tim Meade told investigators.<\/p>\n
Meade said CertaPro found $884,966 missing between 2020 and 2024, when Rossanese was employed.<\/p>\n
As the bookkeeper, Rossanese was responsible for entering automated clearing house transactions into QuickBooks, a cloud-based and desktop accounting software, including payments to subcontractors.<\/p>\n
Meade said Rossanese masked payments to contractors before rerouting the company transfers to her personal accounts through shadow transactions.<\/p>\n
State police Cpl. Ian Marquardt, a criminal investigator with the Reading station, obtained search warrants for the Wells Fargo Bank accounts involved in the fund transfers.<\/p>\n
A review of the records showed Rossanese would transfer money into her three personal accounts, including one in which her paycheck was direct deposited.<\/p>\n
In 2023, the year before she was fired for unrelated reasons, there were 108 automated clearing house transfers totaling $370,548 into those accounts from the company accounts.<\/p>\n
Marquardt noted Rossanese\u2019s annual salary was $52,000, according to the company, when she was fired in 2024 for performance issues.<\/p>\n
Rossanese was interviewed at the state police station in early January with her lawyer present.<\/p>\n
She said she started employment as office manage for CertaPro in October 2018, initially working out of a basement office in the Penn Township home of Tim and Jill Meade.<\/p>\n
The company eventually opened an office in Wyomissing. She said she was let go in May 2024 after a general manager was brought in and determined her duties could be outsourced to save money.<\/p>\n
Marquardt showed Rossanese the bank records. He pointed out the automated clearinghouse transactions and corresponding bank statements showing the payments that were supposed to go to contractors ending up in her personal account.<\/p>\n
Rossanese admitted to diverting the funds, indicating she needed the money to support her lifestyle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Lancaster County woman has been sentenced to Berks County Jail after pleading guilty to embezzling nearly $900,000…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4524,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[349,46,202,182,139,28,128,130,129,706],"class_list":["post-250319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-reading","tag-berks-county","tag-courts","tag-crime-and-public-safety","tag-local-news","tag-news","tag-pennsylvania","tag-reading-city","tag-reading-city-headlines","tag-reading-city-news","tag-top-stories-reg"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250319","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=250319"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250319\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=250319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=250319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=250319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}