"...printer ink worth $6,715,531..."
So, three cartridges then.
What's ordered in Vegas, doesn't stay in Vegas? $6.7m of printer ink 'stolen by office worker'
A Las Vegas woman stole printer ink worth $6,715,531 from her employer and sold it to a reseller on the other side of America, it is claimed. When Jennifer McCain-Bray worked as a purchasing analyst for the Las Vegas Valley Water District – a public utility – she ordered millions of dollars of extra printer ink and toner, had …
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Saturday 30th July 2016 12:16 GMT Commswonk
Re: accounting 101 anyone
How many of us have worked with those, including purchasing, that when we needed something, they ordered a truckload of it...
Once upon a time I was instructed by my HoD to order 50 (Fifty) of a certain form, which I duly did in total accordance with his written note.
What turned up was 50 pads of said form.
IIRC 49.5 of them were still lying around when I retired several years later...
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Saturday 30th July 2016 12:50 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: accounting 101 anyone
My dad once worked at an experimental nuclear reactor. The story goes that somebody once ordered a high voltage capacitor, but the micro prefix ("μ") on the capacitance value got lost during the processing of the procurement paperwork.
It arrived on the back of a truck.
(Might be a myth.)
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Saturday 30th July 2016 14:39 GMT Efros
Re: accounting 101 anyone
Similar story, bottle of Argon was ordered. Chap in the stores receiving queried the amount (about 700 quid at the time) for a single bottle of Ar (usually about 30 quid) seems the lab tech who had ordered it had ordered semiconductor grade instead of lab grade. Difference between 99.9999% and 99.998% purity.
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Saturday 30th July 2016 22:23 GMT Graham Marsden
@Commswonk - Re: accounting 101 anyone
> Once upon a time I was instructed by my HoD to order 50 (Fifty) of a certain form, which I duly did in total accordance with his written note. What turned up was 50 pads of said form.
Good, but not quite as good as happened to a friend of mine who was told by his manager to order one of a certain item code.
He queried it and was basically told "just do what you're bloody well told".
Unfortunately said manager had put the wrong code down, so, instead of one small item, they got one *pallet* load of them!
The manager tried to blame my friend who produced the paperwork signed by the manager...
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Tuesday 2nd August 2016 15:28 GMT Alan Brown
Re: accounting 101 anyone
"Once upon a time I was instructed by my HoD to order 50 (Fifty) of a certain form, which I duly did in total accordance with his written note.
What turned up was 50 pads of said form."
Someone in a place I worked with did this with power cables about 10 years before I arrived (tech site, installing a lot of kit all the time).
Around my 12th year in the organisation we finally used the last one. 1500 2 metre IEC320s take a long time to use up.
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Saturday 30th July 2016 20:09 GMT GrapeBunch
Re: accounting 101 anyone
"they have lots of paper bills to send out"
Just guessing, but woudn't ten of thousands of bills at a time more efficiently be printed on non-ink printers, or contracted out? I think we're talking about office inkjets in the low hundreds. If it works anything like here, the water district would not be sending out individual bills anyway. They'd bill each municipality (and maybe there's only one, because Las Vegas is pretty big), and the municipality in turn would bill the punters. Maybe the first six years of audit investigation failed because they were looking for the person who had printed 10,000,000 images of his or her bum. "But it was a really shapely bum, Missuz Krez Ghee."
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Tuesday 2nd August 2016 15:30 GMT Alan Brown
Re: accounting 101 anyone
" woudn't ten of thousands of bills at a time more efficiently be printed on non-ink printers"
Have you ever seen a chain printer doing a billing run? the paper tends to finally arc over into the out basket about 3 feet above where it exits the top of the printer.
Lasers/inkjets are slow.
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Monday 1st August 2016 07:42 GMT Nigel222
Re: accounting 101 anyone
<i>What more is an auditor going to do?</i>
To exceed expectations: find out how much paper thye organisation ordered, how much ink the organisation ordered, how many pages per cartridge is plausible (the manufacturers quote capacity at industry standard 5% coverage). If the discrepancy is one or more orders of magnitude, find the rat.
To meet expectations (i.e. cover his ass): nothing.
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Tuesday 2nd August 2016 15:25 GMT Alan Brown
Re: accounting 101 anyone
"Have we got the invoices, yes. Have we got the delivery notes, yes. Are the payments on the bank statement, yes. What more is an auditor going to do?"
Not much unless you actually know how much the printers are consuming.
Many scams like this are frequently only uncovered once the miscreant has left the organisation and someone notices that expenditure on XYZ is significantly lower than it used to be.
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Monday 1st August 2016 12:49 GMT Matt Bryant
Re: AC Re: accounting 101 anyone
"....audit the printers to find out. Check how many cartridges have been used...." A lot of offices never do check, especially if they own the printers outright and don't have someone dedicated to managing their printer fleet. There's also the disconnect between different parts of the purchasers (or "porkchasers" as we used to call them), where different people will sign off on enough toner to have printed ten times what is being charged for per-copy support costs for their printer fleet. Toner often gets treated just like stationary, and since it is easy to sell on and often not tracked, stolen just as much as regular stationary items like pens and notepads.
It's not, just office workers and porkchasers, I've heard of scams run by field engineers too. Typically it's component replacements where disk drives and RAM are reported as replaced but often not swapped, the spare part instead going onto eBay. One guy I know got caught used to send printers out on trials and demos - when they came back from a trial they were supposed to have a new cartridge installed before going to the next customer, but most customers actually used far less than a full cartridge in the short time they had the printers. The crook would pretend to swap the toners on returned demo units, falsify the records, then sell the pilfered cartridges as "excess stock" to a friend.
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Saturday 30th July 2016 17:47 GMT Anonymous Coward
Yup or the top boss's personal sec that just happened to have given the entire printer consumables replacement deal to their friend or relative round the corner. Sure, you could get toner quick! However, the new chief accountant was rather shocked to learn we paid rather a lot *per page* even though we *owned the printers* and bought the paper ...... I quietly suggested to him to seriously consider paying an end-of-contract penalty as a longterm investment !
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Sunday 31st July 2016 08:40 GMT ecofeco
Working as a sysadmin, i can tell you half of the purchasing departments ive come across are bent,
So it isn't just me. I've noticed the same thing.
I've learned to spot the signs: the bent ones authorized to make purchases do NOT ever want me hanging about or asking about purchases or have some very secret pet projects or noticing or helping in any way lest I notice something amiss. Nor anyone else.
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Sunday 31st July 2016 17:05 GMT Smilin' Stan
Not a crime if the company does it!
A few years back stateside a multi-state regulated monopoly utility had its rates set at expenses plus X% by the various state regulators. Such utility bought all of its expensed office supplies from a wholly-owned non-regulated supply shadow company - at 100% markup over retail!
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Sunday 31st July 2016 14:07 GMT Jon 37
Re: How does...
It's lawyer weaselling.
If they just put "money", the defence weasels - sorry, I mean the defence lawyers - could have argued "oh, but Paypal accounts don't store 'money', they store 'Paypal credits', so my client is completely innocent of 'illegally transferring money', you should find her Not Guilty".
By putting "money or other things of value", the defence can't make that argument. It's pre-emptive anti-weaselling, and it shows that the prosecution lawyer is good.
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Sunday 31st July 2016 02:59 GMT Anonymous Coward
A colleague used to work for a certain multinational aerospace company. He was ordering parts for an aircraft they were fixing and managed to get one digit wrong on a part number. He was more than a little surprised to get a call from the FBI (not least because he was not in the USA) asking what business he had ordering the "Nuclear Commit" button for our non-nuclear capable aircraft. What was even better is that the button in question is a simple SPST push button that just happens to have "Nuclear Commit" written on it.
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Sunday 31st July 2016 17:25 GMT EveryTime
Note that all involved were allowed to retire or resign before any disciplinary action. They were able to keep their pensions intact, and avoid any negative action (reprimand) that would impact being hired elsewhere.
This also stops the investigation in its tracks.
In the rare case that discipline reaches beyond resignation and impact the pension, it's usually reversed once the press attention disperses.
The only punishment here will be if there is a criminal conviction.
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Sunday 31st July 2016 22:55 GMT Anonymous Coward
How does anyone have $6 million going through a personal PayPal account and no flags are raised?
I dont know how it works in the US with the IRS but in the UK the HMRC would have been notified as soon as a certain threshold was hit.
No mention of where the cash went eg lavish lifestyle etc. Also did the company buying the ink think she was a legitimate seller or were they in on it too?
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Monday 1st August 2016 00:05 GMT a_yank_lurker
@therebel - If one deposits >$10K in a bank account, feral ripoff service is notified because they think that is the minimum amount for money laundering. They also have a nasty habit when they find someone making deposits of about $7K of seizing the account without bothering to investigate how this could occur. Many smallish businesses have been hammered by this.
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Monday 1st August 2016 09:09 GMT toughluck
Up to $1.5m for defrauding $6.7m
Yeah, I get that she will probably face forfeiture. She probably prepared for that and made sure to spread funds as much as she could. Plus, forfeiture might get knocked down in court and she might be ordered to pay just $1.5 million. Some lesson it teaches -- crime does pay if you do it right. Not to forget that if she stopped doing it in 2014, then pretended to be the perfect worker and retired in 2015, she could be well away from all the commotion. I guess people get greedy.
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Tuesday 2nd August 2016 15:44 GMT Alan Brown
management involvement.
"Sounds like others are involved in this not just a few people in the purchasing department."
That's usually the case.
One I got mixed up in revolved around employees in the tax and welfare departments of the New Zealand government selling data to private investigators. It was happening at _every single_ office in the country, had been going on for over 15 years and was only discovered because a net-connected computer in another government department was spotting acting oddly - it was being used as dropbox for the activity. The contractors called in to fix it were put under extreme pressure to not notify the police when they found what was going on (including physical threats).
Mysteriously according to the official investigations, noone above office junior grade was involved, despite a number of convictions for illegally selling personal information and hundreds of people being sacked. To this day the NZ government describes it as "a few isolated cases of employee fraud".
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
