An ex-employee of Wyoming County has been charged with allegedly defrauding her employers.
According to the Times-Tribune, Debra Raimondi allegedly ordered over “1,200 printer ink cartridges” during a four year period, despite the fact that the 911 centre she worked in only used one per year. The huge discrepancy led to her “being charged with defrauding the county” of nearly $93,000 (€87,661).
The crime was discovered after Raimondi had left in 2014, when her successor, Jeff Porter, found that the office was “inundated with ink cartridges”, and Porter told Chief Detective David Ide that “after she left […] I went into her office [and] every desk drawer [and] filing cabinet I opened [and] every shelf in her office had ink cartridges”. He added that the centre only had one printer and “you would be lucky if you used one ink cartridge a year”.
It is alleged that Raimondi “received four percent cash back from Kelly Printing” in Walmart gift cards for being a “valued customer”. The total of ink cartridges ordered was 1,252, worth $92,794 (€87,467), and in return she received four gift cards worth $7,715 (€7,272) between 2009 and 2013.
The Chief Clerk of Wyoming County, Bill Gaylord, told Ide that he was “unaware of such gift cards” but that he did “remember his office questioning the volume of invoices for ink cartridges”. Raimondi has been charged with three offences; theft by unlawful taking, theft by failure to make required disposition of funds and theft by deception.
Raimondi has also been charged in another unrelated case, of “obstruction of administration law” for taping 13 individuals during conversation without their knowledge, and she could face a two-year jail sentence as well as a $5,000 (€4,713) fine.