In a novel attempt at payroll theft penance, a woman arrested on suspicion of embezzling from a company where she was employed as an accountant offered to surrender her 401k to help pay back the funds.
The Stamford Advocate reports the employee, Carol Werner, 62, is accused of stealing almost $50,000 from the Connecticut-based landscaping business over a 16-month period in 2017 and 2018.
“Werner offered to surrender her company 401K, which was worth about $4,000, in order to make a good faith deposit on her debt and said she will repay as much as she is able to,” the paper said Friday.
Her arrest followed a complaint filed by the company in December 2018, when the owner reported that Werner “may have taken as much as $70,000 from the company before she was fired, her three-page arrest affidavit said,” according to the Advocate.
“The owner said he first learned of the theft when he was processing the payroll and saw that a check was made out to a person that hadn’t been employed by the company since mid-2017. The owner determined that the checks made out to the former employee had been deposited into an account belonging to Werner.”
Admission of guilt
When the investigator on the case called Werner to talk about the theft, she agreed to go to police headquarters, where she reportedly signed a statement confessing her guilt.
“Werner said she had been employed by the company for about four years, but her mother died and she began running into health problems,” the paper added. “She said she suffered from chronic pneumonia, diabetes and was hospitalized for an adverse reaction to a medication she had been prescribed. She also said that she was foreclosed on and fractured her left knee, forcing her to miss days from work.”
With more than 20 years serving financial markets, John Sullivan is the former editor-in-chief of Investment Advisor magazine and retirement editor of ThinkAdvisor.com. Sullivan is also the former editor of Boomer Market Advisor and Bank Advisor magazines, and has a background in the insurance and investment industries in addition to his journalism roots.
