Administrator accused of embezzling nearly $600k from her school to pay for IVF treatment and vacations
An administrator allegedly embedded nearly $600,000 from the Christian school where she worked and spent the money on IVF treatment, vacations, meals and Amazon purchases.
Authorities say that Katherine Paprocka stole $579,000 from Pennsylvania’s Penn Christian Academy.
The 36-year-old now faces 29 felony counts related to the theft from the school and businesses that worked with the school between July 2020 and December 2021.
Officials claim that Ms Paprocka assumed the identities and forged the signatures of multiple school employees and volunteers, obtained credit cards in their names and claimed to lenders and other companies that she was the owner of the school.
“Paprocka used the more than a half million dollars of stolen funds for family vacations to London, New York and Florida, as well as for other activities including rental property payments, car rentals, clothing purchases, restaurant meals, Amazon purchases and payments for in-vitro fertilization medical treatments,” stated the Montgomery County District Attorney’s Office.
Prosecutors say that the school is a nonprofit and does not have an owner. A criminal complaint states that the alarm was raised after the school brought in an outside accountant to look at their books.
That accountant told them that “in all his years as an accountant, he has never seen a business entity use so many bank accounts and so many payroll companies in a short amount of time” as the school had.
The complaint says that staff who spoke to investigators said that they had not been paid for weeks of work and some quit still being owed money.
Ms Paprocka was released from jail on a $99,000 bail. She was made to surrender her passport to the court and cannot leave the state.
She is charged with a slew of felony counts including forgery, theft by deception, deceptive or fraudulent business practices and other charges.
Her lawyer Martin Mullaney told CBS Philadelphia that his client denied the allegations against her.
