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September 13, 2022 - 7:00 AM
A former bookkeeper has pleaded guilty to fraud in Kamloops Supreme Court, accused of embezzling more than $600,000 from her former employer.
Katlyn Bond, born in 1990, was charged with fraud over $5,000 and theft over $5,000. She pleaded guilty to just the fraud charge on Sept. 12, 2022.
Although she appeared in court for her plea, she hasn't been sentenced yet and the circumstances were not read out in court.
In civil court, however, Kala Geosciences Ltd. has been trying to reclaim $641,007 she's accused of stealing since 2018.
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The environmental consulting firm hired Bond in February 2017, where she worked as a bookkeeper until August 2018 — a year-and-a-half.
The company accused her of e-transferring money from the firm to her own bank accounts and covering her tracks by using email accounts that looked similar to businesses Kala Geosciences does business with, according to court records.
She bought things from Amazon and Sportchek using the firm's credit cards and used the firm's bank accounts to pay her own utility and credit card bills.
Kala Geosciences filed a civil case against her in Kamloops on Oct. 4, 2018, in which it tried to retrieve all of the money she took.
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The consulting firm filed applications to garnish her wages without response from Bond for more than 11 months.
The amount she was accused of taking varied, starting at $647,000, then increasing to $698,000, until a judgement on Sept. 23, 2019 settled on $641,000.
The court ruled in favour of the consulting firm by default after she failed to respond.
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Criminal charges were approved in April 2021.
Supreme Justice Joel Groves accepted her guilty plea, but she will be sentenced at a later date.
— This story was corrected at 11 a.m. Wednesday, Feb. 22, 2023 to say Katlyn Bond was accused of taking the money over an 18 month period.
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