State Auditor Shad White issued the following statement.
Today State Auditor Shad White announced Special Agents from his office, along with officers from the Warren County Sheriff’s Office, arrested former Warren County Tax Collector’s office bookkeeper Paula Hunt. Hunt was arrested for embezzlement by a public official after she was indicted by a grand jury assembled by District Attorney for the 9th District Richard Smith, Jr. Hunt also received a demand letter for $165,329.98 at the time of her arrest. All interest and investigative costs are included in the demand amount.
As bookkeeper, Hunt
was responsible for handling cash and checks received by the Warren
County Tax Collector and making daily bank deposits for the office. She
also had the ability to transfer funds between the tax
collector’s office bank accounts. Hunt is accused of stealing cash from
payments received by the office from November 2017 to August 2018. To
conceal the missing cash, Hunt allegedly transferred money between
office bank accounts. The embezzlement scheme was
discovered and reported to the Auditor’s office when a bank account
from the tax collector’s office was overdrawn.
“Paula Hunt had too
much control over the money that flowed through her office, and that
control gave her the opportunity to embezzle a large amount of
taxpayers’ money,” said Auditor White. “Public officials around
the state need to be aware of this example and need to review their own
offices to see who might have the opportunity to steal in the same way
Hunt did.”
“It doesn’t matter
how much you might personally trust your employees,” said White. “Be
sure no one person has too much control over cash.”
A $50,000 surety
bond covered Hunt’s employment at the Warren County Tax Collector’s
office. A surety bond is similar to insurance for taxpayers and helps
ensure money stolen or misspent by a public official is recovered.
Hunt will remain personally liable for the entire amount of the demand.
If convicted, Hunt
faces up to 20 years in prison or $5,000 in fines. All persons arrested
by the Mississippi Office of the State Auditor are presumed innocent
until proven guilty in a court of law. The case will be
prosecuted by the office of District Attorney Smith.
The Auditor’s office
has issued demands worth over $4.1 million on behalf of Mississippi
taxpayers since July 2018. The public can help the Auditor’s office
protect public money by reporting embezzlement of public funds
online any time by clicking the red button at www.osa.ms.gov or via telephone during normal business hours at 1-(800)-321-1275.
10 comments:
Is that a mugshot or a selfie?
Go get em Shad!
Now, clean up the DOR and their band of KGB officials
Go Mr. Shad. You da man!
Colleges should be coming soon......billions misspent, while in the last ten years they retired en masse hoping to get away with it. But of course PERS is another pot of money being scammed now.
Coming soon to a county north of Hinds...
I'm with you there 6:39. The DOR threatened to shut my business down over a $14 payroll tax surcharge that my book keeper overlooked years ago. They spent more on registered mail notices than the amount I owed and when I called to settle the issue the time I spent on hold ran into hours and I never got an answer.
And the local agents for the DOR appeared to be DOC parolees.
Keep dreaming 8:40 a.m. nothing going to happen at MadCo. We can only hope he could find something that actually amounted to some MadCo official being dirty just to get their asses out of office. Aint gonna happen though.
2:27 - Your mistake is in assuming the guilty parties are all elected officials.
Oh, its no mistake. I never said anything about the elected officials. The elected officials offices that handle cash on a daily basis will defend their employees with every resource their office has.
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