Case Study Ephonia M Green

Imagine the day you receive an unexpected phone call that makes you have doubts in an employee that has been part of your organization for many years. The employee, a hard working overachieving women, that is well liked and always giving back to her community. Your nonprofit organization whose main goal is to help out future medical students, has lost millions of dollars all thanks to that one employee that everyone trusted. It’s hard to believe that someone that has been part of a nonprofit organization for more than ten years has been able to steal millions of dollars without being detected. In this particular case, the one employee is Ephonia M Green. Green worked as the administrative assistant for the Association of American Medical Colleges
Problems that I encountered during the investigation of Green, was the lack of reliable information. Most of the information I was able to obtained came from the case report that explained the crime that Green was committing. It was also difficult to obtained information due to the low profile that Green had before her arrest. That was because she was an AAMC employee, and owned a bridal shop that once a year donated wedding gowns to the future wives of U.S. service members. She was not a big celebrity other than being known throughout the Washington D.C. area for donating wedding gowns. The crime went undetected for a long period of time due to the lack of supervision from AAMC and for the lack of segregation of duties. Once the invoices were submitted by Green the accounting department should not have returned to checks to Green, and the checks should have been mailed by the accounting department not Green. The accounting department should have also checked each invoice before the check was generated. There was also lack of management oversight, which all of these contributed to green embezzling more than $5.1 million. Embezzlement is a kind of property crime; it occurs when someone is in charge of someone else’s money and they take advantage e and use the money for their own person gain. “In the District of Columbia, embezzlement is punished according to the value of the money or property stolen” (District of Columbia Embezzlement laws, 2014). The crime committed by Green falls under theft in the first degree “The value of the property is $1,000 or more. Penalties include a fine of up to $5,000, up to ten years in prison, or both” (District of Columbia Embezzlement laws, 2014). I believe Green got away easy with only getting sentence to four years in prison. That is not bad considering she stole more than $5