Rita Crundwell Committed Fraud At City Hall

Overview of the case:

In Dixon, a woman named Rita Crundwell committed fraud at City Hall. She stole around $53 million from the city’s funds and was kept hidden for a long time until a whistleblower, Kathe Swanson, exposed her crime. After 20 years of committing this embezzlement, the people of Dixon were demanding a change of government for not taking responsibility for the money that was not in the right hands.

In this documentary, director Kelly Richmond Pope documents the timeline of Crundwell receiving the money and how she suffered the consequences after the city council found out about her fraud. There were different perceptions from the city council, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the residents of Dixon about witnessing

This led to her taking advantage of the trust at City Hall and began to steal funds from the capital development fund account. She took the chance to create a secret account named R.S.C.D.A. Her secret account was called the "Reserve Sewer Capital Development Account." The city council had no idea about the account, and Rita would write the checks to herself. Some of her job duties were to write checks and move investment funds. The organizations believed that the invoices Rita created were for city projects, but they were faulty. Also, she knew that the city council had no policies in place. Nevertheless, Rita hid her fraud by presenting herself as a trustworthy employee with a moral

Regarding accounting anomalies, one of the issues was the source documents. In the documentary, Kathe Swanson, the city clerk, received all the bank statements so she could add them to the annual treasurer's report. When she looked through the statements, she noticed some large deposits to the account Rita had. This was a red flag because Swanson did not realize how much money Rita was taking from the city’s capital development fund to her secret account. Another source documents were the alterations to the invoice documents that Rita sent. When CliftonLarsonAllen saw the invoices, they did not see the edits Rita had created. For instance, there was no logo on the invoice, and there were some misspellings. The auditors from the CPA firm did not catch the fraudulent activities Rita engaged