Woman Charged with Swindling Burnsville Company

A woman from Victoria, Minn., has been charged with theft by swindle after authorities say she overpaid herself and her husband by more than $50,000 at the Burnsville company where she worked as a payroll clerk.

Nancy Ann Tiffany, 52, faces four counts of theft by swindle, all felonies, each of which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $20,000 fine.

According to the complaint against Tiffany, the owner of the company called police in March 2010 and reported that he had uncovered employee thefts between April 2007 and December 2009.

The complaint says Tiffany’s duties at the company included figuring out commissions for sales representatives, including her husband; calling in the payroll to a third-party company; reporting payroll numbers to the 401(k) company; and providing the owner with a monthly report on salary and commissions paid to employees.

Tiffany was the only person who dealt with the payroll between April 2007 and December 2009, and the owner told authorities that he didn’t realize anything was out of the ordinary because the figures she reported to him appeared to be normal.

However, in late 2009, the owner said he became suspicious that Tiffany was paying herself for more hours than she was working, and began checking into his suspicion. He asked for information from the payroll company, but employees there wouldn’t respond because Tiffany had set up the payroll account so that she had sole access, according to the complaint.

The owner says he learned later that the payroll company provided the information he requested, but that the information had gone to Tiffany.

In January 2010, while Tiffany was out of the office, the owner received a packet that contained all his employees’ W-2 tax information for the previous year. When he checked the W-2 of Tiffany’s husband, he discovered that he had been overpaid in 2009; he confronted Tiffany with the information, and she told him that she must have made an error, the complaint says.

The owner launched an audit of the company’s books, which revealed that Tiffany’s husband had been overpaid “for an extended period of time,” according to the complaint. After Tiffany submitted her resignation, a forensic accountant reviewed the company’s records and determined that Tiffany had calculated all the employees’ commissions correctly, except for those of her husband, the complaint says.

The owner told the accountant that Tiffany generated reports reflecting her husband’s agreed-upon pay rate, but actually paid him more. The account eventually determined that Tiffany kept two sets of records: one that she showed the owner that included the authorized payments, and one with the amounts that were actually paid.

The owner and the accountant discovered that Tiffany had overpaid her husband by $54,530 between April 2008 and May 2009, and that she had paid herself $2 more an hour than her agreed-upon salary and for 195 hours that she did not work.

The owner and four of his employees met with Tiffany in February 2010. She initially denied any wrongdoing, but eventually admitted that she had overpaid her husband, the complaint says. Tiffany told the owner that she “thought it would all work out and that she could make it up.”

Tiffany is scheduled to make a first appearance on the charges on June 20.