A former D.C. Water and Sewer Authority employee was charged in a scheme to embezzle a quarter-million dollars from the utility by falsifying the payroll records of workers and steering money to accounts she and a friend controlled, according to court filings.
Sonia Renee Coleman, 28, of Fort Washington, was charged in federal court Monday with two counts of transportation of stolen money.
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For more than a year and a half, Coleman, who worked in the payroll office at the WASA office in downtown D.C., electronically increased the pay of fired or on-leave employees and then changed the employees’ direct deposit information so that the extra money would land in her own federal credit union account and a friend’s account, documents charge.
When the payroll stubs arrived for the employees, Coleman destroyed them to conceal the unauthorized payments, prosecutors said.
In all, the payroll data of 40 employees was manipulated to steal more than $236,000 from the quasi-independent agency, prosecutors said.
About $97,000 went into Coleman’s account in Greenbelt, and $139,000 was transferred into a friend’s Pentagon Federal Credit Union account in Alexandria, court filings said. The friend was identified in charging documents as W.J.
Coleman and her friend spent the money on personal expenses, prosecutors said. The scam lasted from May 2006 to January 2008 until credit union officials alerted WASA officials. Officials at WASA immediately placed the employee on paid leave, hired an accounting firm to examine the payroll records and referred the investigation to the D.C. Inspector General’s Office, a spokeswoman said.
The spokeswoman said Coleman was no longer with the agency, but she did not know when Coleman left.
Coleman, who also uses the last name Dickerson, was charged by criminal information, which is usually an indication that a plea deal is in the works because defendants can only be charged by information when they waive their right to a grand jury.
