The soap opera in my family of late has been my former brother-in-law. We’re all interested in his latest craziness for personal entertainment reasons. Even his children, now 40 and 35, pretty much just roll their eyes when they learn of his latest hijinks.
So he’s working as an accountant for a company in Mississippi. Apparently (and I have no idea how this became known) when he wants to go to the casino he has taken to removing cash from the company safe and leaving a check for that amount.
Assuming the employer doesn’t know he’s doing this (and wouldn’t it be kind of weird if they had sanctioned this behavior?), and assuming he doesn’t have money in his bank account to cover the check (else why not just go to an ATM?), is this illegal? I suspect he’s replacing the cash and destroying the check(s) when he gets the cash to do so, otherwise I’d think he’d have been caught be now.
I’d think that if (when?) caught they’d require restitution and fire him, but if they decided to press criminal charges what would he be charged with? How likely is it he’d get a prison sentence? Or are no criminal charges possible?
Does he have the legal authority to convert his personal check for cash in the company safe at any time? If not, I think it’s called theft, if not fraud, at the very least. If he knows the check will not cover what he actually has in the bank, unless he wins, it gets worse.
Seems to me when he’s caught he will be fired. It’s up to the company to decide if they decide to press charges against him. It may depend upon if the company just wants to bury the issue (with his firing) or bring charges against him. If he has been doing this for quite a while, the company might not want to risk public exposure that has going on for a while and damage the company reputation (It went on for how long before you found out?).
He would probably be charged with embezzlement and/or burglary.
Even if his check was good, you cannot force someone to give you cash in exchange for a check. By stealing the money, he is attempting to force the company to do that.
Legal issues aside, I am looking forward to his getting caught so he can argue that someone else stole the money and forged the check. It’s like a bank robber writing the note demanding money on the back of a filled out deposit slip.
What if he takes the money, but leaves twenty cartons of fresh eggs, which are, after all, worth the same amount?
What if he just leaves a piece of paper with his signature, but no banking information? Hey, autographs of famous people are worth lots of money!
Seriously, it’s doofus behavior, and very likely liable to a criminal complaint. What happens when the cash-room manager needs to give a refund to a customer, and there isn’t enough cash in the drawer?
(At a place I used to work, a guy was doing an inventory shuffle, taking physical items from the warehouse and then replacing them with “equivalent” items of a different brand name. He got caught, and was politely allowed to resign. They could have asked for charges to be pressed, but it wasn’t worth the hassle.)
Sounds like fraud. He doesn’t have the authority to take the funds for that purpose. The fact that he leaves a check is irrelevant. If you “borrow” all of the funds from my bank account without my permission and leave me an IOU, I’d still consider it theft.
If he’s a CPA, he will also probably lose his certification once it’s reported to the ethics board.
An dying rich old man calls to his bedside his three most trusted friends: a minister, a doctor and a lawyer. He tells them, “I spent my life amassing my fortune, and I’ll be darned if I can’t take it with me. I’m giving each of you a third of my money - 10 million dollars each - and I want you to throw it into my coffin at my funeral.”
The old man dies, and the funeral is held. At the wake, the minister says to the other two, “I have a confession to make. I betrayed the deceased a bit. The roof of the church orphanage has been leaking, and it was going to cost 2 million dollars to fix. Rather than beg for it from my congregants, I just took the money from our friend and only put 8 million into his coffin.”
The doctor responds, “That’s a relief. I have a similar confession - the hospital’s fundraising campaign for the new dialysis center came up 5 million dollars short. I decided to take the money out of what he gave me and put only 5 million into the coffin.”
The lawyer looked aghast. “I can’t believe you two - sure those are worthy causes, but you’ve betrayed a dying friend’s trust! i’ll have you know that in that coffin is my personal check for the full 10 million!”
Can’t be Embezzlement unless there is Conversion. Isn’t theft/larceny by traditional definition (because of his position of trust), which is why there were offences like “Embezzlement”
Just taking it home for the weekend is probably conversion (my guess), unless he has a really good excuse like “the building was burning down”.
Playing with it is certainly conversion (my guess) even if he brings it back afterwards: I don’t see deconversion as an excuse for conversion.
If he’s taking it because the casino doesn’t accept cheques, that suggests that a cheque is not the same as cash which suggests that his employers and the courts won’t think the cheque is the same as the cash.
I don’t see fraud (misrepresentation). Interested to see what a real lawyer thinks the name of the crime will be.
which suggests that his employers and the courts won’t think the cheque is the same as the cash.