By Michael Stavola
The Wichita Eagle
(TNS)
A 45-year-old Colby, Kansas, accountant has pleaded guilty to multiple counts, including taking roughly $410,000 from his longtime clients and using part of the money to build his home, according to federal court filings this week.
Quintin Flanagin used his position to write checks from the couple he worked for and their Thomas County business, Diamond M Farms, to send money to a business he had made up called Middle Finger Ranch, which was linked to his bank account, court documents say.
Flanagin had originally been charged in April 2024 with 18 counts: Six for wire fraud, four for bank fraud, two for false statements and six for money laundering. The plea agreement was signed May 27, but was filed this week for four counts: Wire fraud, bank fraud, false statements and money laundering. The others were dropped.
The plea agreement requires him to forfeit about $369,000 in assets, pay back about $51,000 to the couple and surrender his certified public accountant’s license.
He is scheduled to be sentenced Oct. 30. Each count varies from not more than 10 to 30 years in prison, not more than $250,000 to $1 million in fines and between three and five years of supervised release.
He started depositing money from his client’s bank account into his own through six checks between January and August 2022, court records say, and in November and December 2022, he made five transactions of about $409,742 back into the victim’s account.
It is unclear why he still owes the couple about $51,000. On Friday, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Kansas said they would not say more about the case until Flanagin’s sentencing.
Here is what court documents say happened:
Flanagin was a signatory on the bank accounts, a tax accountant and executor of the wills of the couple from whom he stole. They had been his clients for 15 years when he started sending money to his personal bank account.
The transactions: $121,000 on Jan. 18 in a check where he wrote “seed wheat” in the memo line; about $90,000 on Feb. 9; $52,000 on May 11; about $84,000 on June 22, and $18,000 on Aug. 23 with the memo line saying “1,000 bushel seed wheat.”
In order to cover the value of those checks deposited into his account, some triggered loan advances to the victims’ account.
On Dec. 31, 2021, Flanagin had gotten a $131,551 invoice from a contractor to build his new home. He used the $121,000 check he wrote from his clients and placed into his personal account “as payment for the construction of his new family residence,” the wire fraud count in the plea agreement says.
In January 2022, Flanagin sought a loan for construction on his home and needed to show he had sufficient funds to pay back the loan. He “provided a screenshot of an incomplete bank statement” that showed $199,188, but “concealed the additional withdrawals from his bank account, including paying his contractor, which left an actual balance of $67,637.
He said the $121,000 “came from crop sales, when the funds were in fact stolen from the (couple’s) trust account,” according to the plea agreement. The bank “would not have issued the loan had they known the true balance and source of funds in his personal account.”
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© 2025 The Wichita Eagle (Wichita, Kan.). Visit www.kansas.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency LLC.
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Tags: accountant, Accounting, embezzlement, guilty pleas
