Page 19 of Not My Friend
We spent the next twenty minutes showing Allison all the evidence that we’d found. I swear my boss aged ten years while she reviewed what we’d found.
“Let’s go to my office,” my boss said when we were finished. “I want to look at the general ledger.”
It didn’t take long for us to find multiple bogus charges for client assistance, all allegedly for rent or utility payments.
“See, these say Fir Acres Apartments,” Allison pointed to a grouping. “And half of the charges are going to one account, half to another account. It’s the same for the electric company, two different accounts, but one of those accounts is the same as Fir Acres.”
“And the same as what we found here,” Kimberly added.
“I know you need to report this to your boss,” Allison said, looking more stressed than I’d ever seen her. “But I’d like to notify my board immediately if that’s okay. Our board treasurer and I have access to all of our bank and credit accounts, and we need to lock everyone else out until we can do an investigation.”
“Maybe there’s some explanation that we’re not thinking of,” I said hopefully, even though I knew there wasn’t.
Allison shook her head.
“This is all Erin. Look.” She clicked over to the payee fields, where we could see two payees for every landlord we worked with and every utility company. “She made the change on every single one of these. That can’t be a coincidence.”
“I’m so sorry I had to bring this to you,” I told my boss.
“You had no choice.” She glanced over at Kimberly. “Are you done with everything you need to do here Kim?”
“Yes, I’m going to pack up my stuff and head out,” she said. “I’m sorry that this happened, and I agree with your assessment that it appears to be Erin, but we’ll still need to send forensic auditors. It’s standard protocol in these kinds of cases.”
“Of course,” Allison said. “I completely understand. Thank you both for bringing this to my attention. Do you mind closing my door on the way out? I need to make some calls.”
As I walked out I heard my boss heave a loud sigh.
“I feel terrible breaking that news on a weekend,” I said to Kimberly as we headed back to the conference room to gather our stuff.
“Me too, but it had to be done.”
Kimberly
Three months later…
“We’re closing the case on the Sunrise program.”
My boss David appeared by my desk, a piece of paper in his hand. He slid it to me and I scanned it, noting it was an email from the forensic auditors confirming that their investigation was completed.
“The CFO Erin Rose testified under oath that she was the only person involved in the scheme, and the forensic team confirmed this. She’s out on bail awaiting trial, and the agency has made all the appropriate updates to internal controls to prevent something like this from happening again. At the board’s request, we evaluated all their grant and contract revenue, notjust the funding for the Sunrise program. It turns out that the state wasn’t the only victim of the CFO’s deception.”
“How much did she embezzle?” I asked.
“It’s been going on for years. She started with a few hundred a month, but like most thieves, she grew bolder the longer she went without being caught. Last year it was about fifty thousand dollars all told, and that’s assuming we found it all.”
“Damn. That sucks, that’s all money that didn’t go to their clients.”
“Yeah. But the board and executive director have taken this very seriously. They brought on consultants to help them redesign all their systems from top to bottom, and the board took responsibility for not monitoring the financials as closely as they should have.”
“So we’re not going to cancel their contract?” I confirmed.
David shook his head. “No. They’re on a heightened monitoring schedule with us for the next two years, but given the circumstances, we didn’t see any reason to pull the funding and make them shut down a program that’s having such great outcomes for homeless families.”
“Good.”
I spent the rest of the afternoon thinking about Gina. Well, honestly I’d spent a good chunk of my free brain space on my ex-girlfriend the last three months.
I hadn’t seen her or talked to her since the day we told her executive director Allison about the embezzlement. It wouldn’t have been appropriate given that my office was investigating her program. But the truth was, I was glad for the forced distance. The more time we’d spent together, the more I could feel myself falling for her again. I’d assumed that once we were apart those feelings would fade, but they hadn’t, which told me that what I felt was more than nostalgia.
