A provincial court judge has rejected the guilty plea of a woman accused of defrauding a Burnaby school of $66,000.
Jodi Fingarsen, a 47-year-old former bookkeeper at Alpha Secondary, pleaded guilty to fraud in February for 66 irregular cheques she wrote between 2008 and 2010.
She had made out some to herself and some to Alpha Secondary service providers, but all found their way into her own personal bank account.
In a joint submission at sentencing in Vancouver Provincial Court last Monday, Crown prosecutor Peter Stabler called the case “straightforward” and asked for a suspended sentence, one year of probation and mandatory counselling.
He noted that Fingarsen has no previous criminal record and was at very low risk to reoffend.
After reviewing Fingarsen’s psychological assessment and pre-sentencing report, however, judge Frances Howard said she had difficulty with the former Alpha bookkeeper’s “superficial acceptance of responsibility.”
Fingarsen has admitted to writing the cheques and to the fact that they ended up in her personal bank account, but she has denied any “malicious intent” and has said someone else could have perpetrated the fraud because she wasn’t the only one with access to her personal account.
“I don’t take a guilty plea from someone who’s not actually acknowledging that they are guilty,” Howard said.
“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 asked defence lawyer Julie Grenier if her client knew she was committing a fraudulent act when she wrote cheques to herself.
When Grenier said that Fingarsen considered the cheques she made out to herself “reimbursements,” Howard ruled to strike Fingarsen’s guilty plea and send the case to trial.
“How could she possibly plead guilty to fraud if she’s got a legal explanation?” Howard said.
She advised Grenier to review the elements of fraud with her client and arraigned Fingarsen for a trial in March 2015.
Fingarsen, meanwhile, still faces a parallel civil claim from the Burnaby school district, launched in June 2012.
It alleges Fingarsen stole up to $100,000 from school coffers over three years.
During her time at Alpha between 2007 and 2010, Fingarsen was responsible for the school’s financial transactions and some clerical duties, including co-signing cheques, maintaining petty cash, reconciling bank statements and calculating rebates.
She tracked school expenses, prepared financial statements and handled money from students fees, vending machines and fundraising.
Besides writing fraudulent cheques, the district’s 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.”
