A former St. Joseph Village employee has pleaded guilty to Class I felony theft.
In a plea agreement, Laura Boyd was sentenced to 30 months of probation, 100 hours of community service, must pay the Village of St. Joseph $16,000 and the village’s insurance company $59,000, said Mayor Tami Fruhling-Voges.
Boyd was to pay the $16,000 within 24 hours and did so. She has two years to pay the insurance company. The $16,000 was the village’s deductible.
Fruhling-Voges said she thought the punishment could have been more severe.
“I don’t think it’s enough for what she did to the village taxpayers but it is what it is,” said Fruhling-Voges.
Boyd was charged in June of 2018 with theft between $10,000 and $100,000.
Boyd was employed by the village in 2010, and one of her responsibilities was to collect sewer payments.
In October 2017 it came to the attention of village officials that cash payments for the sewer bills were not being deposited into the bank. They did an internal investigation which focused on Boyd.
The investigation focused on Boyd because she had access to computer records for sewer payments and those records showed the sewer accounts were paid in full. The bank deposits did not match the records.
The village fired Boyd in October of 2017.
After Boyd was fired, the Champaign County Sheriff’s Department investigated and found that between 2011 and 2017 more than $77,000 could not be accounted for. At the time, Boyd denied any wrongdoing.
Fruhling-Voges said she was glad it was resolved.
“It was time to get it over with and to avoid dragging it out into a jury trial,” Fruhling-Voges said. “If you think about it what is the proper punishment? We’ll never recoup the time lost by me, the other employees, additional money not included in restitution, the hours by the Sheriff’s Department and the time spent catching up in the sewer department.”
Fruhling-Voges said the village has made adjustments to its internal controls to prevent a similar situation from happening again.
Fruhling-Voges said that the village received an insurance payment two months ago for $59,000 to recoup part of the money that was taken.
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