Clerk Charged With Swiping $1M From NY Archdiocese

NEW YORK (AP) — An Archdiocese of New York clerk with a prior grand larceny conviction was arrested Monday on charges of manipulating the church’s accounts payable system to steal more than $1 million in money used to oversee schools.

Anita Collins, 67, was awaiting arraignment Monday. Her lawyer’s name wasn’t immediately available, and no working telephone number could be found for her Bronx home.

Collins wrote checks to herself or a relative but recorded them as payments for legitimate expenses, such as power bills or office supplies, archdiocese spokesman Joseph Zwilling said.

Most of the archdiocese has had a system that would catch such discrepancies; the Education Department, where Collins worked, adopted the system more recently, he said. Archdiocese staffers and outside auditors spotted the theft in December and alerted the Manhattan district attorney’s office, the archdiocese said.

The archdiocese works to keep its financial controls ahead of such schemes, but “sadly, there will always be individuals who seek to exploit and circumvent whatever system is established,” Zwilling said.

The money was stolen from accounts used to run a central office for some of the area’s Roman Catholic schools, Zwilling said. Between insurance and potential restitution, the archdiocese expects to recover the funds, he said.

Collins has a grand larceny conviction from 1999. She was sentenced to community service and five years’ probation.

She didn’t disclose that when she was hired in 2003, shortly before the archdiocese began conducting background checks for all new employees and for existing employees who worked with minors, Zwilling said.

“It was just a happenstance of timing that she was hired just almost immediately before that program was instituted,” he said.

Collins was fired within 24 hours after the fraud came to light, he said.

In the 1999 case, Collins pleaded guilty after being charged with stealing at least $46,000 from a temporary staffing company where she worked, according to The New York Times, which first reported her new arrest. The paper cited records that weren’t immediately available Monday. An official with the temporary staffing company didn’t immediately return a call.

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