A woman who channeled almost $350,000 from her NZ employer into her own bank account has agreed to repay the money, as well as damages.
In a decision released this week, The Employment Relations Authority said Angela Freiden admitted using false invoices to pay $299,021.62 from her employer (a healthcare provider) into her own bank account.
The invoices disguised the money as payments to suppliers.
Freiden was also liable for $45,092.72 in unauthorised payroll payments which she had made to herself and was not entitled to, authority member Marija Urlich’s determination said.
For her “serious and sustained breaches of trust, good faith and her obligations under her employment agreement,” she was liable for $30,000 in damages.
Ulrich said Freiden’s actions had caused flow-on losses, including tax-related losses and significant costs in identifying the extent of her dishonest conduct and taking steps to address those matters.
(Source - Esther Taunton - Stuff on Friday 13th October 2023)
Now this is an all too common theme that we come across from new clients every week, but only a small percentage of these actually make it into the media.
One of the many, but crucial functions of VigilantPay is to validate the creditor and payroll bank accounts. This fraud would have been picked up on and the clients finance team alerted the very first time a new payment was loaded. Ultimately saving the employer a huge amount of time, money and resources, to uncover the full extent and scale of the fraudulent activity highlighted above.
This could happen to your business at any time. Maybe it has already happened and you are not aware of it.
Another unique feature of VigilantPay is that you can load and check historic batch files. We did this with a client that came on board a few months ago and they uncovered internal fraud from 2 years ago. True story
