COEUR d’ALENE — A man will spend almost four years in federal prison for a multimillion-dollar accounts receivable factoring scheme.

After a six-day trial in August 2024, a jury convicted Douglas Worman, 64, of Coeur d’Alene, of 17 counts of wire fraud relating to his factoring scheme. Jurors acquitted Worman of five counts of bank fraud. A grand jury indicted Worman on the charges last May. 

Chief U.S. District Judge David C. Nye sentenced Worman to 46 months in federal prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release. Worman must also pay restitution in an amount to be determined at a later date, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. 

“This case sends a clear message that, along with our law enforcement partners, we will not tolerate fraud in Idaho’s business community,” U.S. Attorney Josh Hurwit said in a news release. “I am grateful for the FBI’s painstaking investigation of the defendant’s fraud and the tenacious work of our office’s prosecutors to marshal the evidence for the jury.” 

Worman owned and operated Worman Forest Management, a forestry management company based in Coeur d’Alene.  

In 2010, Worman entered into a factoring agreement with U.S. Richards Forestry Management to sell millions of dollars of Worman Forest Management’s accounts receivable that were based on invoices for work the business had provided to its customers, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.  

Factoring is a form of short-term financing in which a business sells its accounts receivable to a third-party at a discount. In a factoring transaction, the seller of an invoice obtains immediate funding from a buyer, and the buyer of an invoice earns a fee for providing the upfront financing. 

Between 2015 and 2018, Worman submitted “inflated and entirely false and fraudulent invoices” to J.S. Richards Forestry Management for factoring, according to prosecutors.   

Worman submitted more than $2 million in false and fraudulent invoices between June 2018 and September 2018, according to court records, purportedly for work performed by Worman’s company. However, prosecutors said, the invoices were for amounts that were “inflated and entirely fictitious.”  

Worman fraudulently obtained at least $2.5 million from J.S. Richards Forestry Management as a result of the scheme, court records said. 

“Douglas Worman is being held accountable for exploiting the trust of his victims,” Acting Special Agent in Charge Albert Kelly of the Salt Lake City FBI said in a news release. “The FBI is committed to protecting Idahoans by investigating and arresting those who seek to defraud others. We also encourage the public to report potential fraud to the FBI.”