Nursing home embezzler's complex scheme foiled auditors, police say

Source: The Wisconsin State JournalJan.儲存 09--NEW GLARUS -- The Belleville woman accused of stealing more than $850,000 from a New Glarus nursing home used a scheme so sophisticated that annual audits didn't catch it and a forensic accountant who was hired to find it almost missed it, the nursing home's director said.Joyce Ziehli, 55, was charged Tuesday with six felony counts of theft in a business setting over $10,000 by the Green County district attorney. A criminal complaint said she stole the money from New Glarus Home Inc. over a 10-year period. Police said she used the money to support a music magazine she published with her husband.She has not been arrested but is scheduled to make her initial court appearance Monday at the Green County Justice Center in Monroe, according to online court records.Ziehli (pronounced ZEE lee), who was an administrative secretary and bookkeeper at the nursing home for 31 years and a former Belleville School Board member, probably was stealing from her employer for more than 10 years, New Glarus Police Chief Burt Boldebuck said.The thefts "didn't just turn on like a light switch in 2003. We had information that led us to believe that it had been going for quite a while prior to 2003," Boldebuck said.He added that investigators didn't go beyond that year because of the statute of limitations and the lack of good record-keeping before that date by some banks.Ziehli's alleged scheme targeted insurance money sent to the nursing home, according to Rick Colby, who took over as New Glarus Home director last September. That was more than eight months after Ziehli was initially accused.He said Ziehli was in charge of an account that took checks from insurance companies that covered a percentage of the cost of medical procedures for the nursing home's residents. Ziehli sometimes recorded the percentage as less than what the insurance companies sent and then took the unrecorded percentage for herself, Colby added.Her alleged scheme was virtually undetectable, Colby said. He added that two accounting firms audited the nursing home's books annually and never caught it. He also said the forensic accountant who had worked on embezzlement schemes with the FBI told him it was one of the most sophisticated schemes he ever cracked.Ziehli also used three schemes to funnel the money to herself, said New Glarus Sgt. Jeff Sturdevant, who was the case's lead investigator.Under one, she electronically transferred money to her personal credit cards. The second involved checks written out to her, and the third involved checks that she wrote out to cash, Sturdevant said.Ziehli wrote out checks from t迷你倉e nursing home payable to cash for more than $400,000 over those 10 years, Sturdevant said. That money is unaccounted for, he added.Ziehli deposited some money and spread it out over seven different accounts at two New Glarus banks, Sturdevant said. She used all of the banks' branches and made sure not to use the same tellers on consecutive days, he added.She was caught last January after the nursing home changed to a different software program and another bookkeeper couldn't get the numbers to add up, Colby said. Ziehli was fired three days later by then-director Roger Goepfert, and the forensic accountant was hired by the nursing home to investigate.The accountant produced an 879-page report that turned up more than 600 illegal transactions made by Ziehli during the 10-year period, Sturdevant said.Some of the stolen money helped fund a free magazine called Americana Gazette that Ziehli and her husband, Andy Ziehli, published that included interviews with country and bluegrass stars, Sturdevant said."If you're going to go to Tennessee or Texas and interview some famous singer, that costs money," Sturdevant said. "They wined and dined people. They had parties and things like that. Who's paying for that when the magazine is free?"Ziehli and her husband also operate a consulting business called Advisory Management and Research Services. They owned a guitar store in Belleville called Action Guitars, but closed it last summer as the investigation into her alleged stealing continued.Ziehli's husband, Andy Ziehli, told police that he was unaware that she was stealing from her employer and learned of it only when police executed a search warrant at their home on East Church Street last June, Sturdevant said.Sturdevant said Andy Ziehli, who teaches accounting classes at UW-Stevens Point, told police that he thought the extra money came from a retirement account that his wife had cashed in early. Sturdevant then described how Andy Ziehli confronted his wife at their home after he was shown some of the details in the forensic accountant's report."He asked her, 'Why were you doing this? Why were you writing checks to yourself? This isn't right,'" Sturdevant said.The most important aspect of the case for the New Glarus police and the New Glarus Home administrators was that the report showed that none of the nursing home's residents' financial accounts were affected."If there's any salvation in this, that's it," Boldebuck said.Copyright: ___ (c)2014 The Wisconsin State Journal (Madison, Wis.) Visit The Wisconsin State Journal (Madison, Wis.) at .wisconsinstatejournal.com Distributed by MCT Information Services儲存倉