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A Kamloops judge wasn't impressed with a proposed house arrest sentence for a local fraudster.

Michele Marie Huston embezzled more than $11,000 from her former employer. The family business was in the midst of grieving the company owner's death, while Huston, 50, worked as a bookkeeper.

Provincial court judge Stella Frame said today, June 29, in Kamloops court that Michele Marie Huston's actions were "horrific."

"It was a family business where a man had died. A woman was going through grief and (Huston) was their support. It's horrific circumstances," Frame said. "It's the most predatory fraud of an employer."

One June 29, Huston's lawyer Joe Killoran and Crown prosecutor Leah Winters proposed a two-year conditional sentence followed by three years of probation. The conditional sentence would have included six months of house arrest with an exception to allow Huston to continue her work as an office administrator.

Huston pleaded guilty to fraud over $5,000 after admitting to embezzling more than $11,000 from Kamloops Heating and Air Conditioning through a combination of time theft, unearned commission pay and use of the company credit card.

She was employed there from July 2019 to the end of January 2020, and she was caught after an employee started to track her work time and compared it to her inflated overtime pay.

Three employees confronted her and she initially denied the time theft, but she admitted to what she did once they showed her the evidence they compiled.

It wasn't until the company hired a new bookkeeper that they noticed the thousands in credit card theft, the court heard.

She used the company credit card to purchase concert tickets, book a hotel at Sun Peaks and schedule rooms at local schools for the Sim'ya Ukrainian Society, a dance group she runs. Huston also bought household goods like a Roomba, a rolling kitchen island and an Xbox.

Crown told the court the air conditioning business was able to get refunds for some of her purchases but many, like the iPad she bought for herself and the cellphone she bought for her daughter, couldn't be refunded.

Huston will likely be ordered to repay around $7,100 that the business couldn't recover once she's sentenced. That amount doesn't include the money the company spent for audits to uncover exactly how much she stole.

Although the prosecutor told the court how much Huston stole, she didn't explain how much Huston accrued in unearned income compared to the credit card use.

Her defence lawyer told the court the proposed sentence was "essentially" a five-year sentence because of the strict probation conditions, which would restrict her from having control of other people's money. He added she has an extensive track record of volunteer work with different organizations.

"The record of the offending here is not the entire life story of Ms. Huston. People can be many things. Ms. Huston is guilty of this offence and previous offences, but she's also a person who takes on much pro-social activity," Killoran told the court.

Huston runs the Ukrainian dance group, but she's also volunteered and helped to fundraise for other organizations and helped Ukrainian refugees settle into the Kamloops area, he said.

Justice Frame told both lawyers their joint submission did not reflect the gravity of the offence, noting it's not the first time Huston was convicted of fraud. Killoran and Winters will return at a later date to provide more case law for the conditional sentence, but it's not clear whether they will return with a more strict proposal.

Lawyers often bring joint submissions to the court. While judges aren't required to abide by those submissions, it's rare to refuse them and higher courts have ruled in the past that there's a high bar for that refusal.

Judge Frame, however, ordered the lawyers to do more homework and come back to her with a better proposal.

"You're fighting an uphill battle here, you need to know," she told both lawyers. "I am not a rubber stamp just because the Court of Appeal says I have to be."

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