Property manager stole lodged bonds from employer, gave herself bonus

A RENTAL property manager stole more than $9000 from her Alexandra employer over two years before her offending came to light.

When Shelley Ann Cockburn was finally caught, the 37yearold Omakau resident told police she had been struggling financially, the problem had snowballed and she could see no way out other than to keep stealing.

Cockburn began working for LJ Hooker Alexandra in 2019, with part of her role being to receive bond payments from tenants and lodging the money with Tenancy Services.

After six months in the job, Cockburn stopped lodging bonds and began moving the payments into an unallocated company bank account.

When she occasionally received bond and rent payments in cash, she was supposed to record them in a receipt book, then deposit the money in a company account.

However, she kept the cash for her personal use at least six times between August 2020 and July last year.

She also falsified records on the company’s property management software in order to receive $3000 in incentive bonus payments she was not entitled to.

Before taking a week off last October, she reluctantly agreed to the company director’s request to leave her work phone and laptop behind.

While she was away, another employee uncovered anomalies, including Cockburn’s failure to lodge bonds since 2020.

The defendant had also disabled an automatic feature in the software system for generating monthly financial statements for its landlord clients, enabling her to hide the fraud.

She was questioned by management when she returned to work and asked to provide receipts for bond payments that should have been lodged with Tenancy Services.

To try to cover her tracks, she created two false bond confirmation notices by editing an official Tenancy Services document, and presented them as genuine.

However, it was found the payments had never been lodged, but instead placed in the unallocated account for her personal use.

She was placed on leave on October 11 and later fired after admitting her offending, which came to a total of $9410.

Cockburn was sentenced in the Alexandra District Court yesterday on six charges of theft by a person in a special relationship, two charges of forging a cheque and one charge each of causing loss by deception and obtaining by deception.

Counsel Jacinta Grant said the defendant had been trying to maintain a lifestyle she knew she could not afford.

She and her husband had been unable to get a bank loan or borrow from other sources to pay the $6410 still owing.

She was working only six to 10 hours a week, which meant she could only pay the rest in weekly instalments.

Judge Michael Turner said the company had assessed the full financial loss arising from the offending at $160,000.

However, he could only sentence the defendant on the $9410 specified.

The company’s victim impact statement said Cockburn’s offending had damaged its reputation, and its employees were now working hard to ‘‘put things right’’ with its landlord clients.

Judge Turner told the defendant she had been employed in a position of trust, and ‘‘abused that trust over a long time’’.

‘‘Your offending was calculated, deliberate and persistent.’’

It was aggravated by previous similar offending; in 2009, she was convicted of four charges of theft from a previous employer.

In what he called a ‘‘closerun’’ decision, he commuted her sentence of 12 months’ prison to six months’ home detention.

He ordered her to make arrangements to pay the $6410 owing in instalments of $20 a week.