BRUNSWICK, Maine – A former employee of Atlantic Regional FCU has agreed to repay the credit union $370,000 of the $520,000 she pleaded guilty to embezzling, as part of a settlement of a civil suit brought by the $250-million credit union.
Marsha Richard, the credit union’s outstanding employee as recently as 2009, was sentenced to 33 months in federal prison in January. She confessed to stealing the money by manipulating accounting entries for checks that credit union members had deposited but had been returned for insufficient funds.
Richard, who worked for the credit union for more than 23 years, was named its outstanding employee in 2009 for spending an average of 525 hours a year on community activities.
As part of her job she reconciled bounced checks. When a check deposited in a member’s account bounced, she was supposed to remove the money from the member’s account and apply it to another credit union account, where the money was taken from originally. Instead, she applied it to her own account or a family member’s account, according to the complaint. The stolen money was being taken from the credit union, not members’ accounts.
