Employee stole $600,000 in funds from Florida school, feds say

An employee became “addicted” to payroll theft and stole more than $600,000 from an alternative school in Florida over seven years, federal prosecutors said.

Now the 41-year-old Summerfield woman is facing up to 160 years in prison, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Florida.

She used her position as the head of payroll at Silver River Mentoring and Instruction, an alternative school attended by middle and high school students in Marion County, to defraud the institution of $616,793.43 between January 2016 and April 2023, prosecutors said.

She wrote herself 137 unauthorized paychecks by entering “false information” into the school’s accounting system and received the money in her bank account from wire transfers, according to prosecutors.

When a financial review of the school’s funds began in April, the woman spoke with the school’s executive director in private and told him she was stealing from payroll funds, court documents say.

“I’ve been paying myself extra money,” she told the executive, according to her plea agreement.

The woman also said she became “addicted to stealing the money,” the plea agreement says.

She has pleaded guilty to eight counts of wire fraud, the attorney’s office announced in a Dec. 12 news release.

McClatchy News contacted her defense attorney for comment on Dec. 13 and didn’t receive an immediate response.

Each count of wire fraud carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in federal prison, according to the attorney’s office.

When the woman alerted the school executive to the payroll theft, she didn’t tell him what she spent the school’s funds on, her plea agreement says.

However, “she said she no longer had any of the money,” according to the plea agreement.

In total, Silver River Mentoring and Instruction lost more than $750,000 from the payroll theft, the plea agreement says.

The woman collected $616,793.43 after deductions were made to the paychecks she issued to herself, according to the plea agreement.

SRMI officials said in a statement that the woman was “promptly terminated” from her job after the school learned of the financial issues, the Ocala StarBanner reported in May.

McClatchy News contacted a school district official for comment on Dec. 13 and was awaiting a response.

The woman will be ordered to forfeit the money she stole from the school and will face a $250,000 fine at sentencing, according to prosecutors.

Her sentencing hearing isn’t scheduled as of Dec. 13.

Summerfield is about 15 miles southeast of Ocala.