A 53-year-old human resource employee in Singapore has been jailed for 18 months for giving herself a bogus pay rise involving $148,000. A report by South China Morning Post (SCMP) said that Tan Lee Nah, who was in charge of the payroll system at D’Perception Singapore, an interior design firm, gave herself $148,000 in unauthorised pay rise to fund her child’s tuition fee and her parent’s medical bills.
She was caught in November 2019 and she had started to submit false claims for expenses two months after joining the company in May 2017. She was giving herself unauthorised pay hikes throughout the course of these two and a half years.
The judge who read out the sentence said that Tan treated the company’s funds like her “personal piggy bank”. The court filings showed that Tan claimed false travel expenses, ranging from $750 to $7,300 each month.
Between January and November 2019, she filed mobile phone expenses, holiday allowances and additional expenditures into her claims. In 2017, she was instructed to transfer funds to the Central Provident Fund (CPF) as contributions for a new employee. She misappropriated the cheques and deposited them into her personal account instead of transferring the funds.
Tan was the only person who knew the company’s payroll system password and it was part of her role to input all the staff salaries into the system.
Her scheme was exposed when an employee noticed a copy of Tan’s salary slip on the printer, which showed that she had received allowances in addition to her basic salary. The employee promptly alerted the management which after launching an investigation and called the police a month later.
The 53-year-old told the court she used the misappropriated money for her child’s education and her parents’ medical bills. She pleaded guilty on June 3 to two charges of sham reimbursement and one charge of criminal breach of trust for cashing two cheques. She had not compensated her employer due to a lack of financial means.
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