A woman accused of embezzling $165,000 from a prominent Vermont hunger relief organization has pleaded guilty to a federal charge.
Sally Hartford Kirby faced one federal count of forging securities with intent to deceive. Authorities said she stole money from Hunger Free Vermont over a period of six years. Kirby worked as the organization’s finance director.
Sally Hartford Kirby is the former finance director of Hunger Free Vermont.
The charge could carry a maximum sentence of 10 years, though that will be decided by a judge.
According to papers filed Monday in federal court in Burlington by the office of the U.S. attorney for the District of Vermont, Kirby wrote unauthorized checks to herself and forged the signatures on them. She then deposited the checks into her personal bank account.
Prosecutors charged that Kirby then tried to hide what she had been doing by entering information in the organization’s accounting system suggesting the checks were paid to vendors.
She allegedly took the money between 2009 and September 2015.
Marissa Parisi, executive director of Hunger Free Vermont, said Monday that the organization worked closely with the Federal Bureau of Investigation to track the extent of the embezzlement.
Kirby had custody over blank checks and would forge Parisi’s signature to authorize them, Parisi said.
“We employed a very shrewd thief,” Parisi said.
Since uncovering the fraud last autumn, the organization has “really taken a sledgehammer to all of our systems,” Parisi said, “because they obviously haven’t worked for us.”
The organization and its board have overhauled the financial protections in an effort to ensure greater oversight, she said.
Hunger Free Vermont went through regular audits, and many in the organization felt confident that adequate protections were in place, Parisi said. She said the organization is now working with a different audit firm.
One of the biggest challenges for the employees of the organization has been coping with the deception, Parisi said. “Now that we’ve looked through all of what we’ve found … it lines up with lies we were told by a person we just trusted so implicitly,” she said.
Kirby’s embezzlement left Hunger Free Vermont with a significant hole in its finances, according to Parisi. However, she noted the organization has not reduced its programming or staffing levels.
Donors have been generous in the wake of the embezzlement, according to Parisi. The organization set up a special fund to help cover the costs of the investigation and the restructuring of the financial controls. So far, Hunger Free Vermont has raised all but $25,000 of the $150,000 goal.
“We were maybe knocked down for a little bit, but we were not down for long,” Parisi said.
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