A loyal employee of Takashimaya — who worked as a cashier for the department store since 1996 — turned out to be not so loyal after all, when it was discovered that she misappropriated $184,213 from 2012 to 2016. Yeoh Kim Hong, 46, pleaded guilty to three of five charges of criminal breach of trust as a servant, and she was sentenced to 33 months in jail on Thursday (Apr 6).
In November last year, the store’s accounts department found inconsistencies in two refund transactions made by Yeoh. The Malaysian, who is a Singapore permanent resident, confessed that those transactions were fake and that she had misappropriated the funds. She claimed that she had been siphoning money for only six months, but when the store delved into further checks, it was surfaced that her bogus transactions went all the way back to 2012.
So how did Yeoh do it? After a customer made a purchase, she would record the amount paid in cash and generate a sales receipt at the point-of-sales machine. Following that, she would create a false ‘Goods Return Slip’ (GRS) with the details of a fabricated customer and note down the same amount that was paid in cash by the real customer. Without alerting anyone, she would then open the point-of-sales machine and take the money.
Yeoh managed to get away with it for so long because the daily transactions tallied when she gave the GRS to the accounts department. She even went so far as to ensure the item in her false GRS was not one on promotion, as the salespeople would conduct their own stock check daily.
It also helped that Yeoh was a trusted employee who had worked in the store for years. But in the end, she manipulated that trust by forging the retail manager’s signature on the fake GRS and submitting it directly to the accounts department.
For her actions, she could have been jailed for up to 15 years and fined on each charge.
