The former payroll director of Grady Memorial Hospital was sentenced Wednesday to more than seven years in prison for embezzling nearly $500,000 from the often struggling public hospital funded in part by Fulton and DeKalb County taxpayers.
Donald Thomas conducted the fraud from December 1994 through June 2011 in part by falsifying additional vacation pay and severance pay for former Grady employees and having the funds deposited into his own accounts, acting U.S. Attorney John Horn said.
“Grady Hospital lost hundreds of thousands of dollars that otherwise would have gone towards patient care,” Horn said. “Grady has made monumental changes to restore its financial health, and Thomas used his position of trust at the hospital to harm these efforts simply for his own personal gain.”
Thomas, 55, of Atlanta, had nearly exclusive control over the payroll systems at Grady, which has provided health care to thousands of Atlanta-area residents – a large portion of whom are uninsured and poor – for over 100 years.
Thomas hid the scheme by carefully reversing his fraudulent charges to the payroll system and by having most of the funds deposited into a business account rather than his own, authorities said. He was laid off when Grady cut its staff in 2011, before the fraud was discovered, Horn said.
The scheme unraveled, however, when Thomas became lax at covering his tracks and some of the falsified pay was reported as income on the former employees’ federal W-2 tax forms, Horn said. In early 2012, one of those employees noticed the inflated income and reported it to Grady. That report put Thomas on the path to prison, Horn said.
A jury convicted him Dec. 5 of stealing more than $480,000 in 136 fraudulent transactions.
U.S. District Judge Charles Pannell sentenced him to seven years, three months in prison and three years of probation, and ordered him to repay $482,851.76.
About the Author
Keep Reading
The Latest
Featured
