Surrey police and the GRC financial crimes are investigating allegations that a former clerk in the finance in the City of Surrey has frauded the city by more than $ 2.5 million by reducing hundreds of checks to accounts associated with itself and its bouting cakes cooking.
According to a search warrant obtained by the CBC, the woman – which the CBC does not appoint because she was not charged – left her job in the finance department in January 2024 after she was questioned about what seemed to be a falsified signature on certain documents.
This irregularity would have led to the discovery of 183 fraudulent checks written to the former legal name of women, to her mother and to her parallel activity – based on funds kept in sleep accounts for years.
“Make fraud since 2017”
Documents indicate that the city’s financial director called the RCMP last January “to point out that its staff in the finance department had discovered fraud”.
A mandate issued in March to search the woman’s work computer said that Surrey City’s financial director Kam Grewal told the police that the woman had committed fraud since 2017, operating her post and had defrauded the city with more than $ 2 million “.
The woman did not respond to messages left Wednesday and Thursday on a mobile phone associated with her business, which identifies her by name. The company seems to have folded and its website has been deleted.
Documents give an overview of the civic deposit process that women are suspected of manipulating to reward.
“The City collects deposits with developers, construction companies and individuals. Deposits have then returned to them once they finished their projects and / or fulfilled certain conditions set by the City,” said the search warrant.
“The City collects thousands of deposits each year and certain deposits have been in the city for more than 20 to 40 years, because projects can be delayed, abandoned or the company has other problems.”
Grewal would have told the police that the woman “had access to the city’s databases which had allowed her to see the details of the deposits and allowed her to modify the beneficiary’s names for the checks to be issued”.
“Check that she did not expect”
According to the search mandate, the woman was initially suspended without salary and was invited to leave the office immediately on January 25, 2024, after being confronted with counterfeiting.
The next day, while the suspect would normally have gone to the payable accounts to recover written checks as legitimate declarations of deposit, a clerk of the engineering service was sent in his place.
The replacement clerk “received 2 additional checks which it did not expect” – one did the mother of the suspect and the other in a cake cooking company.
A former finance clerk in the city of Surrey is suspected of having defrauded the city by $ 2.5 million. The CBC investigation journalist, Jason Proctor, followed the story.
“It was a public notoriety in the office that [the woman] Also had a cake cooking company on the side, “said the search warrant.
“It was also well known that she was a passionate player. [She] Would often speak the experiences she had. “”
The following week, the woman sent an email to say that she will resign immediately. In the hours that followed, she would have called the engineering clerk asking her to make the two additional checks “at the reception so that she can simply recover them”.
The clerk “thought it was strange,” said the court document.
Monitoring of account changes
According to the search warrant, women’s supervisors finally discovered a total of 183 checks for a total of 2,537,599.67 $ written on the three accounts associated between 2017 and 2024.
They followed the unique user identifier of the woman to see where she would have made changes to addresses and beneficiaries linked to holders of deposit accounts in order to make fraud.
The court documents present a complicated process which begins with the allocation of a unique “of-Fournteur” number to each person who leaves a deposit with the city.
In an example quoted in the search warrant, the User Id of Women was used to insert its old name and its current address into a D-Vendor account created for a supplier which gave the city a deposit of $ 9,943 in 2012.
In other examples, the identification of the woman’s user would have been used to withdraw money from the long -term D -Vendor accounts to those who had just been paid – modifying the details of these accounts to issue new checks to her cake company or mother.
Last fall, the police tried to obtain an audio statement from the woman’s mother, who “seemed fairly old enough according to her appearance and slow movements”.
According to the search mandate, the woman’s mother told the police that she did not want to speak to the police.
The response of the city paints a different image
The city answered questions from the CBC on the case Thursday afternoon after being informed that the CBC had planned to manage a story on Friday morning. Rather than responding directly to the CBC’s demand, the city has published a press release on the media scale.
The press release does not refer to the assertion of the search mandate according to which the alleged fraud was discovered following a fortuitous error.
The city claims that the irregularities have been discovered in response to the “mandate of the mayor to ensure a tax -responsible government and protect each dollar from taxpayers”.
“Once the irregularities have been discovered, the city immediately started an internal and committed examination of external forensic doctors. The case was also immediately reported to the Surrey RCMP which conducts a criminal investigation,” the statement said.
“Residents may be assured that decisive measures have been taken to protect public funds and recover the total amount on their behalf. Because the case is in court, the city is unable to comment more for the moment.”
The city also claims to have initiated legal proceedings which do not call the clerk.
None of the allegations contained in the search warrant has been proven by the court.
