White Collar Crime: How did a B.C. social worker embezzle $460K from the government?
involving hundreds of thousands of dollars from the B.C. government, and leaked ministry documents suggest how he was able to get away with it for years.
According to internal documents, Courtney said Saunders came in with a stack of papers for her to sign. Saunders, who had been with the ministry for more than 20 years, was then suspended with pay upon his return from vacation on Jan. 8, 2018.Stynes, his boss, was “reassigned” to other duties and her team-lead privileges were revoked as the matter was investigated, according to emails.
Government documents suggest that Saunders’ base salary would be somewhere around $70,000 a year, or $5,700 a month. At times, he nearly tripled his monthly income by supplementing it with stolen funds, ministry documents allege. Since Jan. 1, 2014, Saunders appeared to cash more than $47,000 in cheques at Interior Savings Credit Union under one youth’s name, according to internal documents.
In December 2020, after a lengthy police investigation, Saunders was eventually charged criminally with 10 counts of fraud over $5,000, theft, breach of trust and using a forged a document. No other ministry employee was charged in relation to the fraud.Advertisement The ministry report said Saunders told investigators he would have never issued “that kind of money” to the youth he works with as he felt they would have spent the money on drugs or alcohol.“He found there was not a lot of attention paid to the processes and no one ever questioned the payments despite case consultations and reviews,” according to the ministry’s initial findings.
However, emails from the finance department to Saunders, Stynes and Thickson over the spring and summer of 2017 flagged irregularities in the social worker’s paperwork. Another email shows that Saunders had been warned that he was not allowed to both request and authorize a payment. The ministry report states that according to its policy, Saunders’ team leader should have been signing off on the cheques. He worked under two different team leaders at separate times between 2014 and 2017.In court, the Crown told the judge the means by which Saunders carried out his fraud was “obvious.”
Under cross-examination in court, Saunders agreed with the Crown that he had identified multiple ways in which he could get funds to himself rather than to the youth. Courtney also said that Stynes was meticulous with paperwork, according to ministry notes, and that there was no explanation as to why she would not be supervising Saunders’ files the same as other social workers.
He admitted that he took the funds fraudulently, but argued that the youth who were supposed to be receiving the independent living cheques were mostly in foster care or living with family, which means they weren’t actually eligible for the payments. Beauchamp also noted that the office manager printing cheques should see a pattern and questioned why Thickson didn’t see a problem sooner, according to ministry interview notes.
According to notes made by a ministry employee, Burnett said she did not think she had useful information and later declined an interview with the ministry. She also declined Global News’ request for comment.The fraud discovered in late 2017 wasn’t the first time Saunders had been in trouble for alleged financial irregularities.
While the glowing employee review was filled out by a different boss, the same person who wrote the reprimand letter signed off on the appraisal form.MNP, the company hired to investigate the fraud, was instructed to review financial irregularities dating back to Jan. 1, 2014. Internal ministry documents also suggest that some youth reported Saunders had asked them to open a joint account at TD Bank in Kelowna’s Rutland neighbourhood.
A report for the ministry said that TD Bank had not been contacted to investigate further as of March 2018. However, the report did find that if Stynes had “discharged her duties as cheque signing authority in a manner consistent with ministry policy, it is unlikely
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