Woman charged with 44 counts of theft

A woman who used to work at a recruitment firm has pleaded not guilty to 44 counts of qualified theft after she was accused of forging the signatures of her coemployees to claim P150,000 worth of tax refunds and Christmas bonuses.

Gloria Paraiso, a former human resource assistant at Temps and Staffers Inc. (TSI), was arraigned on Monday before Judge Germano Francisco Legaspi of the Quezon City Regional Trial Court Branch 77. She was later released after she posted bail of over P1 million.

The case was filed by TSI and her former coworkers who claimed she defrauded them of various amounts of money ranging from P500 to P19,000 between May and July 2006.

Paraiso was hired by TSI, a Quezon City-based human resource placement and consultancy company, as a human resource assistant in May 2005.

Based on the information filed in court, she volunteered to distribute among employees unclaimed checks for tax refunds and 13th month bonuses. She then resigned from the company in July 2006.

Her ruse was discovered the following month when an employee tried to claim her tax refund check only to be told that it had already been released.

When shown the company records, the claimant said that the signature was not hers. A visit to the bank where the check was cashed showed that Paraiso had claimed the money using an authorization letter supposedly issued by the claimant.

The finding prompted TSI to conduct an audit of the checks supposedly disbursed by Paraiso. The firm found out that 48 checks amounting to more than P145 million were cashed between May 4 and July 31, 2006.

Assistant City Prosecutor Fabinda de los Santos, who recommended the filing of charges against Paraiso, said that she found probable cause against the latter since the accused had access to the unclaimed checks as a human resource assistant.

While Paraiso denied the accusations against her, claiming these were unfounded and meant to harass her because she resigned from TSI, the prosecutor said it was better for her to present her defense in court.