TONH Employee To Serve No Jail Time For Embezzling $98K

A former North Hempstead employee was sentenced to serve no prison time on Wednesday for embezzling $98,862.91 from the Solid Waste Management Authority over the course of two years, Nassau County District Attorney Madeline Singas announced.

Helen McCann, 53, of Roslyn Heights, was sentenced to a conditional discharge and ordered to pay restitution of $50,000 to the Town of North Hempstead and a civil judgment of $48,330 to an insurance company for an insurance claim made by North Hempstead. She pleaded guilty to second-degree corrupting the government on January 17.

At the time of her arrest in February 2016, the DA said she faced a maximum sentence of 8 and ⅓ to 25 years in prison if convicted of the top charge. She will serve no jail time as long as she isn't found to commit a further offense.

McCann used her power as administrative assistant for the SWMA to embezzle the funds from the "Resident Drop-Off" program from May 11, 2014 to Jan. 11, 2016, the DA said.

“[McCann] betrayed the trust placed in her to safeguard public funds at the North Hempstead Solid Waste Management Authority,” Singas said in a press release. “With this sentence, we have made the taxpayers whole. I commend the North Hempstead Comptroller for identifying this crime and the SWMA for referring this matter for prosecution.”

McCann, who started working for the TONH in 1998, was transferred to the SWMA in Jan. 2014 as an administrative assistant and was responsible for receiving the program's cash and scale reports and depositing the cash into SWMA's Chase Bank account.

McCann was arraigned Wednesday on second degree public corruption crime and second degree corrupting the government. She was conditionally released to probation and required to surrender her passport.

The SWMA's "Resident Drop-Off" program, which is run on Sundays, accepts yard waste, residential municipal solid waste and residentially- generated construction and demolition debris for a fee. Residents are charged $5 for the first 100 pounds brought in per vehicle and $1 for each additional 20 pounds.

The employees who work at the facility (the "Scale House") would receive the cash payments, generate receipts and enter the amount of garbage and amount of cash collected into a computer program.

On Mondays, an attendant would then bring the scale reports to the authority's administrative office where McCann would deposit the cash into the SWMA's bank account, the DA says.
McCann would also send a memo to the Town of North Hempstead's Comptroller's Office that detailed the amount received at the Scale House, with a bank deposit slip and the deposit ticket/receipt attached, the DA says.
On approximately May 11, 2014, a few months after McCann was at her administrative position, her weekly deposits into the bank account were less than the cash reported on the scale reports, according to the DA. There were many occasions where she would allegedly make no bank deposits at all.

According to the DA, yearly deposits in the account decreased shortly after McCann started working for SWMA:

• $76,352 was collected in 2013
• $62,649 was collected in in 2014
• $17,467 was collected in 2015

The Town's Comptroller's Office notified the Solid Waste Management Authority about the significant decrease in revenue in January and the case was then referred to the NCDA, which opened an investigation on Jan. 21.

McCann was terminated from her position shortly after the investigation began, the DA says.

Image via NCDA