Former Wekweètì SAO, Whatì housing employee sentenced for fraud

A woman who worked as a senior administrator for Wekweètì's community government and later the Northwest Territories housing corporation will serve a one-year sentence for defrauding both employers to the tune of $13,000.

Grace Maria Angel, 49, rose briefly to say "I'm sorry," her voice breaking after hearing lawyers recount how she defrauded the Tłı̨chǫ government of $5,084, fraudulently booked $1,311 in flights on the housing corporation's Air Tindi accounts and stole $6,800 in cash rent payments.

She will repay the money in $300 monthly instalments starting in July.

Angel will serve the first six months of her sentence on house arrest, and the remaining six with strict conditions including a 10 p.m. curfew and reporting regularly to a probation officer.

The court heard from Crown lawyer Matthew Scott that Angel worked for Wekweètì community government from 2010 until 2016, where she was responsible for handling large sums of money and had "poor record keeping."

As SAO, Angel was making purchases on her credit card and being reimbursed for significant amounts by the community government which did not hold a credit card itself.

An audit revealed that Angel was reimbursed for more than $263,533 in legitimate expenses with receipts. 

But by 2016, "concerns arose" for Wekweètì council members about how Angel was managing the band's money. They launched a partial forensic audit.

They found purchases, like a bill from Quality Furniture for $5,084 for a queen bed and frame, a coffee table and a dining room table which Angel had delivered to a Yellowknife address.

Some of the furniture went to her new house in Whatì, where she took a job as housing manager for the Northwest Territories Housing corporation.

After leaving the community government, Angel sold most of the items on Facebook marketplace, the crown said.

By this time, she was committing a new type of fraud — collecting cash payments from housing corporation renters and improperly registering those amounts in two separate accounting softwares, the Crown lawyer said.

Angel would register tenants as paid up on the territorial software so they wouldn't be evicted.

She marked upwards of $16,000 in cash payments on the territory's management system but not on Sage, a popular business accounting software.

Sometimes, months later, the payments would show up in full and with a corresponding entry in the Sage accounting system, said Scott.

The two softwares are not "regularly reconciled" by the N.W.T. government and so the discrepancies went unnoticed, said Scott.

Between June 1, 2017 and December 15, 2017, staff at the housing corporation heard the RCMP were investigating Angel's activities in Wekweètì. 

On Jan 10, 2018, Angel "spontaneously" confessed to the housing corporation manager that she stole $6,800 in cash rent payments, Scott told the court. 

The housing corporation also located an adding machine which she used to keep track of the amounts she defrauded, said Scott.

The corporation later learned that between June 2017 and October 2017 that year, Angel also booked $1,311 worth of personal Air Tindi flights under the housing corporation's account, said Scott.

Angel contacts Canadian anti-fraud agency

In January 2018, Angel made a report to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre that an individual named Ryan Logan had defrauded her personally, said her lawyer, Roopa Mulherkar.

Mulherkar said Angel had recently been divorced and fell victim to an online scam by someone posing as a romantic prospect.

While Angel was on the phone with a person identified as Logan, the call was interrupted by people demanding money for medical expenses for Logan, the court heard.

Bank records show that Angel made bank-to-bank transfers, wire transfers, money orders through Western Union to "Ryan Logan" between April and December of 2017 in the amount of $103,454 outgoing, said Scott.

The money landed in accounts with addresses in the U.K., United States and according to the fraud report, to an address in Nigeria, he said.

Scott said $108,145 of incoming wires sent to Angel had sources in Yellowknife, Ontario, California and Maine but those are not alleged to have been fraudulently obtained.

Angel's report to the fraud centre indicates she never met Ryan Logan face-to-face but her complaint suggests she believed Logan was a real person, said Scott.

Mulherkar told the court her client is a Canadian Citizen born in the Philippines who emigrated to Canada alone five months after giving birth to her son and worked for five years as a caregiver.

She described Angel as growing up in a stable and highly religious home, where she raised her siblings and had a "disciplinarian" father.

Angel has a Grade 12 education, her lawyer said, but had pursued a career in medicine before the pressures of childrearing cut her studies short.

Mulherkar said her client has always held a job and that her client's guilty plea spared the court a lengthy and expensive trial.