Woman jailed for $800,000 Workers’ Compensation fraud
By TONY BLAIS, COURT BUREAU
A “pathological liar” who defrauded the Workers’ Compensation Board of nearly $800,000 while working there as a case manager has been put behind bars.
Sandra “Sam” Plumite, 40, was sentenced to three years in prison this morning after the judge hearing the case rejected her plea for community-based house arrest.
“A sentence in the community is not appropriate to emphasize denunciation and deterrence,” said Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Robert Graesser.
“This was a theft of a very large scale from an employer who trusted her,” said Graesser.
The judge accepted Plumite suffers from a number of psychiatric and psychological issues due to an “unfortunate and tragic childhood” and needs extensive therapy.
However, Graesser ruled they do not reach the level of exceptional circumstances, which is needed to trump a required denunciatory sentence for employer theft.
“I am not satisfied she is not a danger to the community,” said Graesser, calling her a high risk to re-offend in a similar fashion. “As a pathological liar, she cannot be trusted to be honest to any future employer.”
The judge also ordered the St. Albert woman to pay $769,106.77 in restitution to the WCB.
Plumite earlier pleaded guilty to charges of fraud over $5,000, corruptly accepting a secret commission and uttering a forged document.
Court heard she had accepted $117,500 in illegal payments to her bank account from an injured worker who was getting extra WCB money he was not entitled to as a result of her doctoring his claim.
Even the fraudster’s resume was phony as court heard Plumite had bolstered her job application by falsely claiming she had received two diplomas from Grant MacEwan College and lying about a previous bank job.
According to a statement of admissions, Plumite worked as a WCB case manager from Sept. 5, 2000, to June 24, 2003, and her job consisted of reviewing claims of injured workers and deciding what benefits they would get.
Plumite’s frauds were discovered when WCB management did a review of the injury claims of one of her clients, Gurcharn Singh Sidhu, after becoming aware of a large number of unjustified payments to him authorized by her.
The review disclosed Sidhu received more than $300,000 in benefits he was not entitled to and further investigation revealed he had made eight deposits to Plumite’s personal bank account totalling $117,500.
Further reviews showed Plumite had approved other unauthorized payments to more than a dozen WCB claimants using a variety of deceptions, court heard. The total of the overpayments was $769,106.77.
Some of the deceptions included modification of WCB computer system records; giving advance payments, but failing to make the required deductions from the regular payments; and making large settlement payments without any supporting medical diagnosis or documentation.
Court heard Plumite also authorized hugely inflated mileage payments or training allowances, payments for child care expenses for persons with no minor children and benefit payments for an injured worker who had died.
According to the statement of admissions, Plumite also reopened the closed file of one injured worker who happened to be a friend of her ex-husband so that she could repay him money that she had borrowed.
In January, Sidhu, a 52-year-old Airdrie man, was given a two-year conditional sentence to be served in the community, followed by three years of probation, after pleading guilty to paying a secret commission to Plumite.
