The pension fund run by Maynard, a small town 20 miles outside of Boston, isn’t very big. It has $29 million in assets and serves about 270 total members.
But the fund is making headlines today for an unfortunate reason: it’s been revealed that the fund’s director, Timothy McDaid, had stolen $739,000 from the fund since 2007.
What’s more, his scheme would have continued if it weren’t for an anonymous tipster who informed the fund of the theft. From the Boston Globe:
McDaid, who oversaw Maynard’s $29 million retirement fund, was attending a 2012 conference of public pension officials. Such events are usually predictable affairs, but this one took a dramatic turn.
Three colleagues from the Maynard pension board pulled McDaid into a meeting room to confront him with troubling information. Through an anonymous fax, they had just learned that McDaid had a drug problem and that six months earlier he was convicted of stealing $165,000 from a charity where he had kept the books.
“Did you hurt us too, Tim?” one of them asked.
His long-running ruse exposed, McDaid broke down in tears, according to board members. He admitted writing himself $739,000 in checks from the town’s pension fund. The news was shocking. But it shouldn’t have been.
[…]
McDaid, now 48, joined Maynard’s retirement system in July 2007 with an impressive resume. He had been chief auditor for the Public Employee Retirement Administration Commission, known as PERAC, the group that regulates Massachusetts city and town pension systems. But Maynard’s pension directors did not realize that McDaid had been asked to resign from his $80,000-a-year job there. And they did not call to check his references.
For months, McDaid cut checks to himself from a small office in Maynard’s Town Hall, where he was paid to administer a fund with 98 retirees and 186 active workers. Heavy turnover in the town’s financial staff meant there was no second set of eyes on the books, according to court records and interviews. McDaid told officials he was happy to help out by writing the checks and reconciling the bank records.
McDaid had pilfered $739,000 from the pension fund. And he might have continued to drain money from the system if it hadn’t been for the mysterious fax that arrived in PERAC’s office the Friday before the Hyannis conference.
It was a copy of the court case from the Asperger’s foundation theft. There was no cover sheet, no traceable fax number.
There’s much more to the story, including how auditors failed to uncover McDaid’s prior conviction of stealing from a charity organization. You can read the full story here.