The South East Cornerstone Public School Division has had to contend with another financial loss due to intentional corrupt actions by an employee. It’s the second fraudulent incident to hit the division within the past year.
The most recent information was contained in the report by the Ministry of Education concerning financial losses to school divisions due to fraudulent or disruptive behaviour by employees between September of 2014 to the end of November 2015.
The incident in the Cornerstone division occurred in December of 2014 when an employee intentionally destroyed computer system data that impaired the division’s ability to run its computer management software.
The damage to the school division was $5,425 with Cornerstone being able to recover just $3,000 from the unnamed employee who had resigned his position on the Monday morning following his weekend sabotage.
“He terminated his employment himself and left on his own accord. The act was intentional and when he tendered his immediate resignation and then we discovered we couldn’t access the management program, it wasn’t difficult putting the pieces together,” said Shelley Toth, chief financial officer for the public school division.
The formal name for the sabotaged sector was Systems Centre Configuration Management Software.
“We have large groups of computers that can be managed from central locations by rolling the software out to them. It helps larger businesses like ours to work with others remotely,” said Toth who added the division’s computer system didn’t shut down, just the management segment.
The costs were stacked up through the amount of employee time spent on the corrections and that included Cornerstone personnel as well as Microsoft experts. Toth said there were both “hard and soft costs involved in this situation.” It took three days to restore the management software system.
After the employee left, follow-up contact with him was made through Cornerstone’s legal department which negotiated the partial repayment scheme. Toth said it was not known if the former employee had gained employment elsewhere in the province.
“We didn’t collect the full amount. That was something our lawyers decided to settle on with his lawyers, I suppose. They didn’t want to take the issue to court.”
Cornerstone also fell victim to a long-distance telephone fraud incident last year which resulted in over $8,000 in costs to the division with partial repayment by the perpetrator of about $5,000 also being the end result. That incident was reported earlier.
Toth said the matter was brought to the board and was discussed with the school division’s auditors. The person who sabotaged the software was in the technical department and therefore had access to the management systems. The former employee held a trusted position within that section, and therefore the auditing team determined there wasn’t much that could have been done to prevent this particular incident since it was a matter of the employee belying the trust that had been placed in him to operate in a professional manner.
The only other financial loss in the province in the Education Ministry’s last reporting period was suffered by the Northwest School Division where a third party breached the division’s voice mail system and therefore was able to charge fraudulent long-distance phone calls to the school division.
That matter cost the Northwest School Division $5,326, with insurance covering all but $1,000 of that loss.
