EL DORADO COUNTY, Calif. – The District Attorney’s Office handed former mayor Tamara Wallace’s embezzlement case to federal officials last year after determining the likely sentence within California did not “match the harm” of Wallace’s crime, according to a Sept. 17 press release.

Wallace now faces up to 20 years in prison for embezzling nearly $390,000 from a church in South Lake Tahoe. The U.S. Attorney’s Office charged her with one count of felony wire fraud on Sept. 15, following a federal investigation.

District Attorney Vern Pierson said Wallace must face consequences proportionate to her crime, an outcome which he asserted was not possible under California state law. Pierson emphasized her crime was while in a “position of public trust.”

“In our view, policies adopted under Governor Gavin Newsom have too often placed the interests of criminal defendants ahead of meaningful consequences and the rights of victims, a ‘criminals first’ approach that has made accountability increasingly difficult to achieve in state court,” Pierson said in the press release.

The DA’s office said it began investigating Wallace in September 2025 after she publicly confessed to siphoning money from the church’s accounts over the course of more than six years while she was its primary bookkeeper and resigned from her position as mayor.

In its investigation, the DA’s office determined that if Wallace was convicted at the state level, she would have spent no more than about a year in prison due to California’s “lenient sentencing laws,” the press release said. 

The release also said Wallace could have possibly invoked California’s mental health diversion law, which occurs before a plea or conviction and, if successful, can result in all charges being dismissed. The DA’s office noted that after a statewide expansion in eligibility of mental health diversion cases in 2022, more judges have granted mental health diversions in “serious cases” like this one.

“The result is a system that too often offers little consequence for serious crime,” the press release reads.

So, in 2025 the DA’s office contacted the U.S. Attorney’s Office to take over the case. The DA said its investigators and an investigator from a federal FBI task force assisted in the investigation that ultimately resulted in Wallace’s federal charges.

Now, a federal judge will determine Wallace’s fate using federal sentencing guidelines.