A former school bookkeeper accused of fraud told a B.C. Provincial Court she did not fraudulently deposit cheques from her Burnaby school or from another Vancouver employer into her personal bank account, and she has no idea how they got there.
Jodi Fingarsen, a former bookkeeper at Alpha Secondary School and receptionist at the Altus Group real estate consulting firm in Vancouver, said the first she heard of the cheques or the fraud allegations against her was in a 2012 NOW article about a Burnaby school board civil lawsuit against her.
She said her arrest on criminal charges on July 18, 2012, more than two years after she was fired by the school district, came as a total shock.
She acknowledged, after copies of the questionable cheques and her personal bank statements were presented in court, that the cheques had been deposited into her accounts at PC Financial and the Bank of Montreal but said she had never been aware of them.
“I understand what it looks like,” she said during cross examination, “but that is nothing that I did. I do feel stupid. I don’t do that with my accounts now. I’m very diligent to look at it, but at this particular moment in time, I did not.”
The case against Fingarsen centres around 85 cheques, including bogus Alpha Secondary cheques made out to her directly, third-party cheques made out to businesses and individual’s owed money by Alpha, and third-party cheques made out to the Altus Group from clients for services rendered.
Worth a total of nearly $99,000, they were deposited into Fingarsen’s personal accounts at automated teller machines while she was at Alpha between April 2008 and 2010 and at Altus between September 2010 and 2012.
Paycheque to paycheque
During cross-examination, Crown prosecutor Jennifer Horneland pointed to Fingarsen’s personal bank statements and noted that, for a single mother making less than $2,400 a month at Alpha and supporting two teenage boys, the bookkeeper’s spending appeared to be well beyond her means.
The prosecutor noted one period of three days during which Fingarsen’s debit card purchases totalled more than $700. She also noted Fingarsen’s account was overdrawn by nearly $800 within months of her suspension from Alpha.
“When you live paycheque to paycheque and the paycheque ceases to come, obviously there will be shortfalls,” Fingarsen responded.
But Horneland – pointing to bank statements that showed as much as $10,000 cycling through the bookkeeper’s personal account in a month – challenged the idea Fingarsen had been living paycheque to paycheque during her time at Alpha and the idea that tens of thousands of dollars in cheques could have passed through her account unnoticed.
“I’m going to suggest to you that, for this period, which was a period of 22 months … that it was impossible for you not to notice your bank balance at some point, given that at some points you agreed you were getting a balance when you would go to the bank machine and make a deposit,” Horneland said.
But Fingarsen maintained she had neither deposited the questionable cheques nor made the many bank card purchases indicated on the bank statements.
“If that wasn’t you doing the spending, who was it?” Horneland asked.
“I don’t know,” said Fingarsen.
Decision Dec. 8
Fingarsen’s trial wrapped up Monday, and a decision on the case is expected from Provincial Court Judge Joseph Galati Dec. 8.
In her final submission, Horneland argued it would be irrational to conclude anything but that it was Ms. Fingarsen who committed the fraud.
“The evidence is there, the bank documents, and, as I said, there’s just no other reasonable explanation for those cheques being deposited into Ms. Fingarsen’s account,” Horneland said.
“There has been no alternative explanation offered by Ms. Fingarsen or presented in the evidence for the presence of those cheques in her account.”
Horneland said evidence put forward by the defence about problems with Alpha Secondary’s accounting software, missing files and school money possibly being funnelled into a term deposit were “red herrings” that didn’t explain how or why third-party cheques drawn on the school’s account ended up in Fingarsen’s personal bank account.
“The mess, if you will, at Alpha Secondary of the books provides somewhat of an explanation of how it was that this went on for as long as it did without being detected, and that’s the extent of the relevance of that evidence in the Crown’s submission,” Horneland said.
Fingarsen’s lawyer, John Banks, argued the Crown’s case lacked hard evidence.
“Not one Crown witness has been called that saw my client steal a cheque, create a phony cheque, deposit a cheque,” he said. “There’s not one bit of evidence, and given the length of time this matter went on for, my respectful submission is it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect evidence in that regard.”
Throughout the trial, Banks emphasized investigators had failed to produce any photo or video evidence of Fingarsen actually depositing any of the cheques at an ATM.
RCMP lead investigator Const. Anna Taylor told the court police didn’t get photos or video of who made the deposits because too much time had passed and the footage was no longer available.
