41–50 of 331 posts
That is absolutely disgraceful on the part of the accountants and programmers who should have been reconciling the cash vs sales. Over 13 years!
They should have incentivized them with an annual bonus for reconciliation. Obviously keep the ticket and cash people separate (so they don’t just game it to get a bonus).
A quick Google didn't return any books on this, unfortunately. What stood out for me was that the Canadian tax authorities didn't get to him. Maybe he payed tax on his earnings; the article doesn't clarify.
Is not paying tax on income from theft actually tax fraud? I mean, the theft itself is obviously unlawful. But perhaps you wouldn't be taxed on theft proceeds anyway, so no tax laws are broken in that case.
Edits, thinking about it...the article says he claimed the money was from his business. And the bank took in the money. So perhaps he did pay tax?
His salary, in real terms, was pretty good by the way. Way more than I earned as a software dev for many years.
$38k in 1981 in Edmonton was firmly middle class.
Plenty of homes cost less than $100k. Rent was in the $100-300 per month range for a nice 2 bedroom.
Dude just got greedy. If he had skimmed $600 per week instead of $3000, he would have doubled his take home pay and likely never would have been caught. It would have amounted to almost $100k every 3 years which is a tidy sum back then.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 20% could easily be missed if it ended up looking like a ticket wasn't sold at all (ie. just 20% fewer tickets got sold). Many railways don't keep track of the paper that tickets are sold on, because the same paper is used for printing receipts, seat reservations, free/discounted tickets etc. Many railways also have a double digit percentage of fare evasion. Also, many railways operate partially/mostly on governm…
But surely they would have a counter of how many tickets were sold in a machine?
Unless his coins were microscopically thin, three sides would be more accurate
Kara was effectively stealing 20% of LRT fares over the 13-year period; one in five coins that were fed into the machines by the paying public ended up in his shaving bag This can't be right. How can one person steal 20% of the coins going through all the machines? Have they miscalculated the amount he took versus one year rather than 13 years?
It would also mean that with him stealing $2.4M, their total proceeds over 13 years were $12M which is less than $1M a year to run their whole LRT.
That said, https://edmontonsun.com/opinion/columnists/gunter-edmonton-t... gives much higher numbers operating costs and fare revenues.
> In a report released Tuesday, Wiun revealed the cost to operate Edmonton Transit went from $105 million a year in 2000 to $327 million last year.
Maybe a lot of the revenue comes from transit passes and/or card payments and the 20% are supposed to represent only tickets sold for cash?
Edit: Just saw the year, so you'd have to adjust that for inflation again too, but credit cards likely weren't a thing for transit passes.
Interesting. A litte after that time, aged 13-14, I was interested in coin pusher machines[0], which (despite being gambling) were not age restricted where I lived. Obviously I wanted a way to do better than the system allowed and wanted to know if I could use magnets to pull the coins towards me[1]; some research showed that some "coppers"[2] were magnetic and others weren't, and that it seemed to depend on the date…
> Obviously I wanted a way to do better than the system allowed and wanted to know if I could use magnets to pull the coins towards me[1] In other words, you wanted to cheat. I can't comment on whether that's fraud in a legal sense, it's still cheating.
There's a reason 13-14 year olds aren't held to the same standards as adults.
> Remember, every coin has two sides Unless his coins were microscopically thin, three sides would be more accurate
> Remember, every coin has two sides Unless his coins were microscopically thin, three sides would be more accurate
Interesting. A litte after that time, aged 13-14, I was interested in coin pusher machines[0], which (despite being gambling) were not age restricted where I lived. Obviously I wanted a way to do better than the system allowed and wanted to know if I could use magnets to pull the coins towards me[1]; some research showed that some "coppers"[2] were magnetic and others weren't, and that it seemed to depend on the date…
The newer 'coppers' are magnetic, so I doubt it. The reason was because they were becoming more expensive to make than their face value. Anyway you couldn't steal a significant amount in coppers, the main debate is whether to get rid of them entirely.
Now, yes. But this was the 90s. You could still (just about) buy some items for a single penny back then.