Nationwide — Vera Liddell, a former worker of a faculty district in Harvey, Illinois has admitted to stealing $1.5 million value of rooster wings from the district’s meals service program. Liddell, who’s 68 years outdated, was arrested in January 2023 and has since pleaded responsible to the fees. She served because the meals service director for Harvey College District 152, positioned close to Chicago, for over a decade. Following her responsible plea, she was sentenced to 9 years in jail.
In keeping with WGN-TV, the fraudulent actions occurred in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic when college students had been unable to attend faculty in individual. Regardless of the absence of scholars, the varsity district continued to offer meals for college kids that their mother and father may choose up. Throughout this era, Liddell exploited her place by putting massive orders for rooster wings, which had been by no means delivered to the scholars. As an alternative, she used district funds to pay for these unauthorized purchases.
Court docket data reveal that Liddell ordered greater than 11,000 instances of rooster wings from the district’s meals provider, utilizing a district cargo van to retrieve the orders. The investigation into her actions confirmed that not one of the rooster wings ever made it to the varsity or had been distributed to college students. The entire worth of the misappropriated rooster wings amounted to $1.5 million, all of which was funded by the varsity district’s price range.
The scheme was carried out over a 19-month interval, beginning in July 2020 and persevering with till February 2022. It was solely in January 2023 that the district’s enterprise supervisor uncovered the scheme throughout a routine mid-year audit. The audit revealed that the district had exceeded its annual meals service price range by $300,000, although they had been solely midway via the varsity yr. This important discrepancy raised instant pink flags.
Along with the price range overage, the enterprise supervisor discovered it peculiar that rooster wings had been being ordered within the first place, as they weren’t usually served to college students as a result of presence of bones. This anomaly additional fueled suspicions and in the end led to the invention of the fraudulent actions. Regardless of the investigation, it stays unclear what Liddell did with the huge amount of rooster wings she had stolen.
