SINGAPORE – An account manager at a hire purchase car company faced difficulties in collecting payments from customers who argued with her.
So she duped her employer into thinking that some of its clients had made payments when they had not, creating receipts for these purported transactions even though the company had not received the money.
As a result, the company suffered more than $232,000 in losses from 2016 to 2020. Details about the firm, including its name, have been redacted from court documents.
On Aug 5, Yue Tai Yau, 59, was sentenced to 10 months and two weeks’ jail after she pleaded guilty to two counts of cheating and one count of criminal breach of trust.
According to defence lawyers Josephus Tan and Cory Wong, Yue, who resigned from the company in December 2020, “did not unduly enrich herself with a single cent” from her cheating charges.
Stressing that Yue had always been an anxious person since she was young, the lawyers from Invictus Law Corporation added: “She was not able to balance the accounts because of the difficulty collecting the payments. She entered random numbers so that the accounts could balance.”
Deputy Public Prosecutor Emily Koh said that the company would enter into various loan agreements with its clients.
The clients would then pay monthly instalments in exchange for the use of cars throughout the tenure of the loans.
They could pay with cash or by cheque over the counter at the company’s office.
As an account manager, Yue’s responsibilities included collecting payments from clients and depositing them into the company’s bank account at the end of each working day.
After that, she had to record the transactions in the firm’s accounting system.
But on at least 64 occasions between 2016 and 2020, she duped the company into thinking that customers had made payments to it when they had not.
Her offences came to light in early December 2020 when one of her colleagues approached a male client over several outstanding instalments and found out that he had not made any payments.
But the client’s account stated that several receipt vouchers had been raised in relation to payments purportedly made with cheques.
The client then confirmed that he had never seen nor received any of these receipt vouchers. He also confirmed that he had not used cheques to make any payments.