State payroll clerk accused of stealing nearly $30,000
A former employee of Ohio’s Department of Developmental Disabilities was indicted Tuesday after authorities accused her of logging hundreds of fraudulent hours for another employee and diverting nearly $30,000 into her personal bank account.
Tiffany Diggs, a 17-year employee of the department, was responsible for payroll and benefits for all employees at the agency.
Diggs’ felony indictment by a Franklin County grand jury on charges of theft in office, tampering with records and filing a false or fraudulent tax return comes after a four-month investigation by the state’s inspector general.
The joint investigation with the Ohio Department of Taxation says Diggs manipulated time cards for 17 pay periods to the tune of nearly $40,000, or $26,904 after taxes.
In her role as a payroll clerk, Diggs had access to employees’ time cards, tax information and directdeposit accounts. Diggs, authorities say, made changes to an employee’s account 84 times, logging 522 fraudulent hours.
Beginning in April 2017, Diggs would wait until after the bi-weekly audits for the Department of Developmental Disabilities were run, and would then go into a specific employee’s payroll account and add additional hours or a dollar amount to that employee’s time sheet, Franklin County Prosecutor Ron O’Brien said in a news release.
The employee whose hours had been manipulated filed a complaint in March 2018 when the accountant doing that employee’s taxes noticed the extra earnings. That employee then notified a manager at the department, according to the investigation.
The manager was able to discover through a review that Diggs had added her American Express account to the employee’s direct deposit. The direct deposit was being diverted into two separate accounts, one for Diggs and one for the employee. When confronted with the manager’s findings, Diggs said the American Express account was not hers.
The 47-year-old Diggs had worked for the state for 24 years and earned $58,603 in 2017.