FILE — U.S. District Court in Little Rock is shown in this file photo.

A Sherwood woman was indicted by a federal grand jury in Little Rock last week on 27 counts of bank fraud, all stemming from when she worked as an office manager for a Little Rock eye clinic.

Sherri Lynn Tidwell, 41, is accused of taking 446 checks totaling $277,767 -- some of them personal checks from patients and others checks from the patients' insurance companies -- and depositing them into her personal bank accounts without authorization. The checks were made out to the eye center and were intended as payments for patient accounts.

The indictment says Tidwell carried out the scheme from June 2016 through August 2018. It doesn't identify the eye center she worked for, but online records show she worked for the Hardberger Lieblong Eye Center in Hillcrest in 2018.

According to the indictment, Tidwell's duties included managing all the eye center's financial records, which authorized her to make deposits into the business' bank account.

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It says that instead she deposited some of the checks into her own accounts at USAA Federal Savings Bank and Wells Fargo Bank.

When confronted by USAA about numerous checks deposited into her account that weren't made out to her, she falsely claimed that she owned a consulting firm that worked with several doctors, and that the checks were delivered to her as payment for her consulting services, the indictment says.

It says she also falsely claimed that when she collected on doctors' accounts receivables that were overdue by six months, the money belonged to her instead of the doctor.

The indictment accuses her of defrauding the federally insured financial institutions that had control of the checks.

The checks ranged from $100.83 deposited into her Wells Fargo account to $2,344.37 deposited into her USAA account.

No attorney was listed for Tidwell in court records.

Metro on 01/14/2020