Former Alpha Secondary School vice-principal Sandi Lauzon laughed aloud in B.C. Provincial Court Thursday when she was shown a copy of a school cheque with what she described as a “likeness” of her signature on it.
The cheque, for $3,465, was made out to the school’s former bookkeeper, Jodi Fingarsen.
“I 100-per-cent never signed that cheque,” Lauzon said when Crown prosecutor Jennifer Horneland asked why she had laughed when she saw it. “I would never sign a cheque to a staff member for $3,000. There’s no reason why a CUPE member or teacher would ever pay for something that’s that huge, first of all, nothing someone would be allowed to buy and be reimbursed for."
Fingarsen's salary, meanwhile, was paid by direct deposit, and she wasn't paid for her work at the school in any other way, according to earlier testimony from former Alpha principal Ron Hall.
Fingarsen is on trial for defrauding the school of $67,000 by fraudulently depositing school cheques, including third-party cheques made out to vendors owed money by the school, into her personal bank account between April 2008 and April 2010.
Lauzon was one of four former Alpha staff members who had signed school cheques during that time, along with Hall, vice-principal Dianne Carr and office manager Maria Jensen.
In court this week, each of them was asked to look over images of school cheques that had been deposited into Fingarsen’s personal account and look for their signatures.
Like Lauzon, Carr and Jensen noted numerous cheques signed with their names but not, they said, with their proper signatures.
“The n on my last name is not curled around like I usually do,” Jensen said of two cheques.
That curl was there in her signature on the school’s Vancouver City Savings Credit Union business account signature form, she said.
Hall, meanwhile, testified Fingarsen had, on more than one occasion, gotten him to sign a cheque to pay a bill and then come back at another time with a second cheque for the same bill.
He said Fingarsen had told him a second cheque was needed because the first had been lost in the mail.
Hall said he had signed them after checking the attached back-up documents and the bank statement to make sure the first cheque hadn’t cleared.
But Carr, a first-time vice-principal at the time, said she had signed cheques presented to her by Fingarsen without the required back-up documents, like receipts and invoices.
“Many times there were quite a few cheques to sign, quite a bundle,” Carr said. “She would ask me to sign them very quickly because we needed to have these things in in a timely fashion; we were a little bit late…and she would stand there and wait for me to sign, so I would just quickly sign the cheques as I looked through them.”
On one occasion Carr said she even signed a blank cheque presented to her by the former Alpha bookkeeper.
After Fingarsen was suspended in April 2010 and district investigators got access to copies of school cheques that had been deposited in Fingarsen’s personal account, Hall told police it appeared as though Fingarsen had sought out the inexperienced vice-principal to sign cheques.
“Diane (Carr) wasn’t as familiar with our account or who we were owing money to, and she wouldn’t necessarily recognize if the bill had already been paid, ” Hall said in a June 2010 police statement read out in court.
In March 2009, almost a year before Fingarsen’s suspension, a district auditor conducting a routine audit of the school’s books had not been able to properly track randomly selected cheques through the school’s accounts.
A number of former Alpha staff testified they had raised concerns with their principal about unauthorized transfers and shortfalls in their school accounts and complaints from vendors about unpaid bills.
But Hall said the district’s and school’s initial approach was to help Fingarsen improve her work performance.
“We weren’t trying to catch somebody doing something dishonest,” Hall said.
“My mind was to help this woman get her job done.”
A turning point for him came in Spring 2010 when he told Fingarsen he needed a PE account summary right away for a morning meeting with PE department head Cheryl Woods.
Walking to that meeting, he said he noticed about $4,500 had been transferred into the account minutes before the summary was printed off.
The document said Hall and Woods had authorized the transfers, but Hall testified they had not.
With the transfers, Hall said the P.E. account balance was about what it should have been.
“It appeared that money had been put into the account to get that total up to a number that would make Ms. Woods … satisfied with the total that was in the account,” Hall said.
Seeing the transfers raised concerns, according to Hall, because it looked like money was being “shifted around” to obscure shortfalls in the accounts.
“We weren’t aware cheques were going awry at that time,” he said.
The district suspended Fingarsen with pay eight days later, according to Hall.
Fingarsen’s trial continues Nov. 16, 17 and 18.
