Chapter 12 Gina
Gina
“There’s a discrepancy here.”
I looked up from my laptop as Kimberly held up one of the ledgers we’d gotten from our CFO Erin.
“What do you mean?”
“The ledger says that you gave two hundred dollars of client assistance to help this client pay their electric bill,” Kimberly said.
“But your case notes say that when the client asked for help with utilities, you helped them fill out an assistance application for the electric company and they were later approved.”
I frowned. “That can’t be right. Maybe Erin used the wrong client name?”
She shook her head. “This is the fourth instance I’ve found where a client file says they got assistance from another agency with rent or utilities, but your fiscal reports say that you used grant funds to pay them.”
“We rarely use grant funds for rent or utilities beyond the move-in assistance. We try to save our client assistance dollars to be last in to make them stretch farther.”
“Come look at it yourself.”
I walked around the table and watched over her shoulder as she pointed out the four examples she’d found. My stomach twinged with discomfort at what I was seeing.
“Shit, that does look weird. We need to look at all these records, don’t we?”
She nodded. “I’d rather we research them ourselves and see if we find a reason for the discrepancies before I talk to my boss.”
My heart thudded painfully in my chest. If there were financial anomalies, our entire grant could be at risk.
Surely Erin wouldn’t do something shady?
She’d been with the organization for twenty years.
The board and my boss respected her. She’d always been supportive of me and my program. There had to be another explanation.
Four hours later I had to admit that there didn’t seem to be any other explanation.
Not only had we uncovered several other bogus payments, but every one of them had been transferred into the same bank account.
There was no reasonable explanation why the same account would be used to pay for services that were covered by multiple utilities, let alone multiple landlords.
“What back-up do you typically get for your budget?” Kimberly asked. “Is there something in your reports that would tell you something weird was going on?”
I knew what she was asking. She wanted to know if I’d missed what was going on right under my nose. I wasn’t offended though. It was a fair question, giving the situation.
“Let me grab my files and we’ll check it out.”
I returned with the reports I received each month from Erin, a heavy feeling in my heart. This was bad. Really bad.
“I get these reports,” I told Kimberly, dropping into the chair next to her so we could look at them together.
“There are line items for client assistance as well as all the other allowable expenses, but I don’t get detail information to know what contributes to the totals.
I’ve always just trusted the numbers. It’s a large program with a lot of payments coming in and out. ”
“That makes it easier to hide things,” she pointed out, studying my reports.
“Shit. What are we going to do?” I asked.
If she noticed I was saying ‘we’ like we were in this together, she didn’t say anything.
“Let’s review the rest of the charges and make copies of everything, then I’m going to have to take it to my boss on Monday. He’s going to want to send in the forensics team to look at all your financials.”
I inhaled sharply. I knew she had to do it, but I also knew it was bad.
“What about Allison?” I asked. “Can I tell her?”
Kimberly nodded. “I think you should, as soon as possible. She’s going to want to put Erin on leave and immediately lock her out of all the accounts while we do an investigation. If she gets a whiff of an investigation, there’s no telling what damage she could do to you.”
“She’s been here forever,” I said sadly. “She’s a fixture here.”
“Sometimes when people have been in one place for a long time, it makes it easier for them to steal. People trust them after so many years of service, and if they think they haven’t been paid enough or they have a gambling problem or other reasons they need money, it’s easy to justify the theft.”
Kimberly gave me a serious look.
“The thing is, the thing Allison needs to think about too, is that if Erin’s doing this with the state grant, she’s likely being even more brazen with any foundation grants or donor funds where there’s even less scrutiny.”
“This is going to kill Allison,” I said. “She thinks of all of us as a family. I think… are you okay if I call her and ask her to come down so we can tell her together? I think she’s going to need to hear it from both of us and see the evidence herself to fully believe it.”
“Sure, but how are you going to get her down here?”
I shrugged. “I’ll tell her there’s an emergency here at the office. Because our CFO stealing money from us is an emergency.”
An hour later Allison came striding into the conference room, her expression concerned.
“Oh. Hi Kim, I didn’t realize you were here.”
My boss sent me a look I couldn’t interpret as she tried to assess the situation. I hadn’t told her much, just that I had an emergency at the office and needed to talk to her in person right away.
“You told me there wasn’t fire, flood or blood, but given the fact that the state is still in my building, I have a feeling this isn’t going to be good news.”
It was a running joke in the social work community that if something didn’t involve fire, flood, or blood, it wasn’t a true emergency, no matter how much the clients thought it was. I guess I was going to have to add embezzlement to that list.
“Have a seat Allison,” I suggested.
“What’s wrong? We didn’t meet our program outcomes or something?”
Kimberly and I exchanged a look, and she gave me a little nod, telling me to break the news.
“We’ve found some… inconsistencies in the bills we’re sending to the state.”
Allison huffed out a sigh of relief. “Oh, that’s it. What is it? We paid for some expenses that the state doesn’t like so we need to reimburse them?”
I shook my head and took a deep breath. “I’m afraid it’s more serious than that. It appears that the agency has been billing the state for client assistance that we didn’t provide.”
“I don’t understand.”
Allison looked at Kimberly, like maybe I wasn’t making sense.
“There is a pattern of charges to your contract for utilities or rent assistance which, according to the tenant files, Gina’s team did not request or authorize.”
“We rarely pay rent or utilities,” I reminded my boss. “In some cases, the client asked for help, and we referred them to another agency for funds and in many cases, there was no documented discussion of financial assistance with the client at all. But Erin still billed the state for them anyway.”
“There must be a mistake,” Allison said, looking a little ill.
“All of the charges were electronically transferred to the exact same bank account, regardless of who they were purportedly going to,” Kimberly explained. “And every single transaction was authorized by Erin Rose.”
“Let me see.”
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.”