Bookkeeper stole $330K over 4 years, cops say

A former bookkeeper for a Chester County ladder company admitted to police she stole more than $330,000 from her employer and used the funds to go shopping thousands of times over four years, authorities said Thursday.

Cynthia M. Taylor, 37, was charged Thursday with felony theft and related crimes. Once a major account manager for Ballymore, a company that makes rolling safety ladders, Taylor, of Gap, Lancaster County, told authorities in July that she took advantage of her company-issued credit card and bought thousands of dollars worth of items, including gifts, groceries, and apparel for herself from 2013 to 2017.

An accounting of Ballymore’s credit card statements showed Taylor shopped 56 times between August and September 2017 and spent around $17,000. Investigators said she also admitted to making more than 2,000 purchases on Amazon, spending more than $300,000 on the company’s dime.

Authorities said Taylor was a senior-ranking bookkeeper who was responsible for checking employees' expense reports, including her own. In February 2013, three years after she was hired, she began to use her company credit card for personal purchases but masked her offenses by labeling them as business-related charges, according to the affidavit of probable cause for her arrest.

In October 2017, two employees investigated discrepancies between Ballymore’s monthly credit statements and employees' expense reports, investigators said. The controllers discovered that only Taylor’s reports seemed suspicious.

“Taylor admitted that once she started to re-code her purchases and not being discovered,” authorities wrote in the probable-cause affidavit, “she just kept doing it.”

Taylor posted $150,000 unsecured bail on Thursday. Her preliminary hearing is scheduled for Jan. 24, 2019.