A relatively clever person in a position of power over the money can steal an astounding amount before anyone catches on. The key is, of course, they they’re in charge of the money. How COULD anyone else catch on? Lavish lifestyles are very easily explained away. I inherited some money, I really tore it up during the dot-com craze, I hit a real estate jackpot, I’ve maxed out my credit cards, you can come up with a million reasons why you could afford the Lexus.
I worked for a company where the comptroller stole at least $3 million in a span of just four or five years, and it might have been substantially more. It wasn’t a big company; during that time annual revenues probably topped out at $30 million a year, so he was taking an amount analogous to the example in the OP, relatively speaking. He lived an openly lavish lifestyle. How? He was in charge of the money, he had successfully fooled the company’s president into giving him free reign over the money, and his position of power allowed him to fire or discredit people who asked the wrong questions. Innocent questions (hey, how did you get that $450 shirt?) could be explained away by simple answers. Eventually he got caught, but it took years and wasn’t even noticed by the President; it was HER boss, at the parent company, who finally authorized the investigation. It’s easy to steal when you’re the one running the money. He even hoodwinked external auditors for years. (It is noteworthy about the Dixon, IL story that the person who first smelled a rat went to the FBI. In my old company, what happened to four or five people is they went to management, and were promptly fired.)
This sort of stuff is, I suspect, more commonplace that we realize, because it’s so easily done and so hard to catch if a person is skilled at covering their tracks, and they can quit and flee if the heat begins. There’s a million petty Jerry Lundegaards out there. I know of at least one business that went belly up because the receptionist was copying paychecks and dropping them into her account; this was a company of 15 people, and she stole $250,000 in eighteen months. She was caught purely by chance. There wasn’t enough oversight.
There must always be independent oversight. No business should ever, ever, ever allow one person unfettered, unobserved access to the money. Evidently the town of Dixon did not know this. Crundwell is the theif, but someone else screwed up. Read the whole story, and it’s clear NOBODY was watching her, and over the years she created a bubble around her to prevent oversight.
I would guess that Crundwell’s thievery increased as time went on. The graph in the article accredits her with stealing two thirds of the cityu budget over the last five months of her “career,” but that is obviously a much higher level of theft than it could have been for the whole period of time, just going by the math. That’s pretty common, too. It starts out small, and the more the thief gets away with it (and the more they become accustomed to having the money) the more they steal.
