SINGAPORE, July 25 — Lured by the large sums of money she handled in her role as the administrative assistant of a temple, Tham Lai Ying pocketed S$38,799 of the temple’s funds between March and May 2022.
She spent the money on her personal and household expenses, including buying groceries and dining at restaurants daily.
Her misdeeds were found out in late May 2022, when the finance executive of the Toa Payoh Seu Teck Sean Tong temple, where Tham was employed, discovered that she had failed to submit some of her utilised receipt books.
Findings from an internal audit on June 1, 2022, revealed that Tham had misappropriated money from the temple, and she was suspended from her duties a few days later on June 4.
On Thursday (July 25), the 40-year-old pleaded guilty to a charge of criminal breach of trust.
Two other charges will be taken into consideration in sentencing.
Tham’s mitigation and sentencing will be heard on Aug 13, after her lawyer asked for an adjournment to allow her time to sort out her “personal issues” and to pay her bills.
What happened
On Feb 8 in 2022, Tham was hired as an administrative assistant at the Toa Payoh Seu Teck Sean Tong temple.
As the administrative assistant there, she was entrusted to collect membership fees from the temple’s members and collect the donations from the public for charitable causes.
For each sum received, she would issue a receipt from the temple’s carbon-copy receipt book to the member or donor, stating the amount and purpose of the transaction.
She would then retain the duplicate copy of the receipt in the book.
She was expected to keep the cash collected in a locked drawer on the temple premises, until all the receipts in the receipt book were issued. No one had access to this locked drawer except her.
After a receipt book was fully utilised, Tham would then hand over the book containing the duplicate receipts, together with all the cash collected under that book, to the temple’s finance executive.
In return, Tham would receive a new receipt book for further use.
The finance executive would then verify the amount collected against the duplicate receipts in the book.
For her job, Tham received a monthly salary of S$1,600.
Between March 5 and May 26 that year, however, Tham misappropriated a total of S$38,799 from the cash that she had collected on the temple’s behalf.
Of this sum, S$37,799 were donations from the public meant for the temple’s charitable activities, while the remaining S$1,000 were membership fees collected from the temple’s members.
Court documents stated that Tham did so out of “greed upon seeing the large sums of cash collected”.
Since the fully utilised receipt books contained records of the amounts that Tham had collected, she withheld some of the books and did not give them to the finance executive as required.
Initially, Tham intended to cover up her misdeeds by replacing the misappropriated amount at a later date without the knowledge of the temple’s management.
However, as the misappropriated sum grew, she could not afford to and did not do so.
Discovery and arrest
Some time in late May 2022, the temple’s finance executive discovered that Tham had failed to submit some of the receipt books she used between March and May that year.
The executive alerted the temple’s secretary-general and an internal audit was done on June 1.
The audit findings revealed what Tham had done and she confessed when confronted.
She later agreed to repay the S$38,799 to the temple through instalments.
On June 20, 2022, the temple’s secretary-general filed a police report and Tham was arrested on Feb 27, 2024, following police investigations.
To date, she has not repaid the temple.
For criminal breach of trust, Tham could be jailed for up to 15 years and fined. — TODAY