How to Succeed in Business: The Embezzlement Edition

You guys, we’re in the wrong business. The money is not to be made on the collections floor or as a supervisor. The money is to be made by being the unscrupulous office manager for a debt collection agency.

Recently, Bruck Law Offices, a Milwaukee collection law firm, had to say goodbye to office manager Sanjuana Rodriguez for skimming around $75,000 between March 2008 and October 2010. Monday, she pleaded guilty to embezzlement, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

“Whenever I felt like needed money I would take it,” Rodriguez is alleged to have said; “maybe take $200 up to $1,000.” Rodriguez used the mad money for shopping sprees and trips (though clearly not on Embezzlement for Dummies.) The money quote is here, though: “It wasn’t a daily thing.”

Rodriguez is currently free on bond and awaiting a sentencing hearing, scheduled for June, and a restitution hearing, also scheduled for June. While she’s out, she had to promise not to work in accounting or in any job where she might handle money (I can’t imagine why).

The funny part: the story was picked up on the American Bar Association’s Journal site.  ABAJournal.com has a rabbit hole of related links of other law firm office managers making creative choices with the math:

• Beth Friedland of New Jersey law firm Maloof Lebowitz Connahan & Oleske, was given the chance for a new career opportunity in July of 2010 after is was discovered that she had helped herself to $1.1 million over a five year period. She needed some of that money to restore a vintage car, the article alleges.

• Joan Sanchez of Chicago law firm Kelly Olson Michod DeHaan & Richter helped herself to $884,000 for things like “lunches with her mother at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange lunch club.” Sanchez was found out when a $40 reimbursement check bounced while she was in Hawai’i.

• Rosalba Garcia of Chicago law firm The Goldberg Law Group needed some help paying off some credit card bills — as we all do, sometimes — so she used the law firm’s checking account over a four-year period to get a little ahead of her due dates. She was outed by the credit card company.