Anyone else confused as to how a Mecklenburg County employee working in the tax collections department can steal almost $55,000 and have it not impact the accounts of individual taxpayers?
I frankly do not believe what the county claims. The money came from somewhere — the tax collections office does not print it. The cashier charged with felony embezzlement worked in cash, duh. She took in cash from taxpayers, is charged with skimming some off, and the rest went to the county. Light.
Specifically $54,477 light. The county says it found 77 discrepancies dating back to July 2006. That is about $700 per incident. Without knowing the total amount a cashier takes in a day it is impossible to say how big a percentage of daily receipts that might represent. We are also assuming that the county asks its cashiers to balance daily, which is the accepted practice at all establishments that handle cash.
But if the county’s official account is to make sense then the only possible scenario is that the county did not notice for almost two years that a cashier was claiming receipts of, say, $2000 and only turning in $1300. This immediately suggests a wider conspiracy. There is just no way that sort of short would go unnoticed in any professional cash-handling situation.
The only alternative to a wider conspiracy to hide aggregated receipts fraud is that individual taxpayers did have their accounts impacted by this activity. Cash they handed in was not credited to their accounts, but the county has quickly doubled back to fix that to be able to say that, “There is no indication that the theft prevented or resulted in improper crediting to taxpayer accounts.”
Sorry, something does not quite add up.
