Anatomy of a scam: How $110k was taken from school

SALISBURY — Roger Rawlings, chairman of the Salisbury Central School Board of Education, described how former board clerk Lori Tompkins siphoned away $110,000 from Salisbury Central School, in an interview Monday, March 29.

Tompkins, 35, was sentenced last month at Litchfield Superior Court to three years of prison, as part of a 10-year sentence.  Tompkins will also have to serve five years of probation and will be required to make restitution. She pled guilty last year to the charges.

Rawlings described the fiscal sleight-of-hand Tompkins used.

“She padded her own paycheck,� he said, and was able to get away with it in part because Rawlings, although he signs all Board of Education checks, was looking at net amounts, not gross.

“That’s the mistake I made,� he said ruefully.

During the tenure of then-principal Paul Sales, Tompkins requested a credit card for board use. What nobody realized, Rawlings said, was that there were two cards. Nobody knew Tompkins had one as well.

And in order to cover her tracks, Tompkins manipulated  board accounts and the school’s student activity fund.

Rawlings said the student activity fund is meant for small purchases and typically had $2,000 to $3,000 in it at any given time.

“So she’d write a check to, say, the bus company for a field trip,� Rawlings said. “Then, using an erasable pen, she’d erase the bus company name and put in hers.�

Then she would submit an invoice for the same field trip to the Board of Education, and replace the money in the student activity account.

The bogus invoices were typically part of a bunch submitted every couple of months, and thus were not especially noticeable.

Tompkins was opportunistic, Rawlings said, taking advantage of the transition period between Sales and current principal Chris Butwill.

“She’d pull small amounts from all over� into the student activity account to mask her thefts.

In retrospect, Rawlings said that when longtime secretary and board clerk Joan Wilkinson retired in 2002, the person hired to replace her didn’t work out; and by the time Tompkins was on board “there was nobody to mentor or train her.�

He noted that while Tompkins was hired in October 2002, the thefts didn’t begin until 2005.

Last year, the Salisbury Central School Board of Education had to create a budget from scratch, a laborious process made necessary by the uncertainty created by Tompkins’ actions.

And several safeguards were put in place.

“We no longer have credit cards,� said Rawlings firmly.

Invoices are collected and processed every two weeks now, and each invoice must first be approved by Butwill, the check made out by Sue Bucceri (the new board clerk) and then sent to Rawlings for signature.

“All the checks I sign now are attached to a report with the specifics.�

The student activity account is now computerized; checks cannot be manipulated. Reconciliation of accounts is now handled at Town Hall (instead of by the board clerk), and the board is planning to introduce a debit system for school lunches and field trips, to eliminate the need for cash or checks to come into the school.

Even sports referees, who used to get a check from the home school coach after officiating a game, get paid twice a month now.

And in the silver lining department, the reconstruction of last year’s school budget inspired structural changes — the upper and lower buildings’ maintenance costs are now separated, for example — that will make future budgets more accurate.

“We’re still finding things out,� Rawlings said. “Electricity was spot on, because we were actually counting kilowatt hours, but we found that our heating oil figures were a little high.�

But the theft still irks Rawlings.

“Look, it happened on my watch. She manipulated my trust.�