A bookkeeper who pleaded guilty well over a year ago to defrauding a Burnaby school of $66,000 has yet to make a plea that sticks.
Jodi Fingarsen, a 48-year-old former bookkeeper at Alpha secondary, pleaded guilty to fraud in February 2014 for 66 irregular cheques she wrote between 2008 and 2010.
During a sentencing hearing in June 2014, however, judge Frances Howard threw out Fingarsen’s guilty plea, saying the bookkeeper hadn’t actual acknowledged guilt.
“She seems to be doing everything she can in her interviews to avoid admitting the actual act of fraud by kind of slipping under the umbrella of accepting responsibility in a very vague sort of way,” Howard said.
Since then, Fingarsen has been scheduled to enter a guilty plea four times, according to court services online, but each time her case has been adjourned at the request of her lawyer, the second she has retained since her case began.
Fingarsen appeared in Vancouver Provincial Court last Tuesday, and her case was put off again until June 16.
Crown Counsel Peter Stabler called the case “straightforward” at last June’s sentencing hearing.
When asked this week how long cases of this kind usual take to resolve, he said, “Not this long.”
Besides the criminal charges, Fingarsen also faces a parallel civil claim from the Burnaby school district, launched in June 2012.
It alleges Fingarsen, who was Alpha’s bookkeeper between 2007 and 2010, stole up to $100,000 from school coffers over three years.
Besides writing fraudulent cheques, the civil claim alleges Fingarsen “fraudulently converted, for her own use and for her own benefit, various amounts of cash received from numerous sources as a result of fundraising activities, donations, student fees and fees for field trips, etc.”
After criminal charges were laid in March, Burnaby RCMP spokesperson Cpl. David Reid told the NOW civil cases tend to follow the criminal trials.
“The civil trial looks to see what is happening with the criminal case first,” he said. “A civil trial does not require the (beyond a reasonable doubt) standard of evidence a criminal trial does.”
Stabler, however, said there’s no reason the criminal case should be holding up the civil claim.
“They should have no effect on them whatsoever,” he said. “Civil can go in parallel with criminal and vice versa.”
