Cash Larceny, Part 12

"Lucille,” a central office bookkeeper at a school district, was a smart woman. Unfortunately, she was also needy. Lucille needed a lot of money to pay for continuing medical expenses and care for her husband who was incapacitated after life-threatening heart surgery.

So she began a sophisticated lapping scheme by taking currency from funds transmitted to her office by many decentralized locations throughout the district.

But she didn’t stop there. Because the function was totally under her control, she began stealing from accounts receivables in other districts. Lucille would bill these districts for services performed on their behalf, receive payments on these accounts, and then steal the revenue instead of depositing the money in the bank.

There’s more. Lucille stole cash receipts from miscellaneous revenue sources and falsified accounting records to try to conceal these losses from managers. Finally, the district discovered two of these checks in her office that hadn’t been promptly deposited in the bank and questioned her about them.

She was able to satisfy her supervisor’s initial inquiry about these transactions and corrected the situation by including them in the bank deposit she was preparing. Lucille then left work to take her husband to a scheduled medical appointment. Her supervisor inspected Lucille’s office and found nine additional checks in her in-basket totaling almost $600.