An Arizona man, former finance chief of a property management firm, landed himself a 24-month prison sentence after swindling over $3 million from his employer and its clients. The United States Attorney's Office reports that David Efrem Katz, the 56-year-old ex-CFO of Durand and Associates, a company that caters to homeowner associations, devised a scheme to embezzle millions between 2012 and 2017.
Katz's company tenure at D&A stretched back to 1998 when he started as an ordinary accountant and climbed the ranks to CFO. With the reins of the company's financial matters firmly in his hands, Katz misdirected funds meant for business expenses to pad his own pockets. Despite having a base salary to the tune of $47,500, Katz paid himself $6,500 bi-weekly. According to the Justice Department, this paycheck pillaging was just a fragment of his fraudulent activities.
Katz also reimbursed himself for fictitious expenses and non-existent business costs. He managed to pull in an additional $6,000 to $10,000 every two weeks under guises such as "recovery loans," and bonuses. The Justice Department details how these deceptions piled on, snowballing into a multi-million dollar fraud.
Katz's financial fiasco came to a head on June 26, 2023, when he pled guilty to one count of wire fraud. Facing justice in U.S. District Court, Judge Katherine M. Menendez handed down the sentence. The ex-CFO has been mandated to serve two years of supervised release post-prison and fork over full restitution for his illegal income inflation scheme. This outcome arrives courtesy of an FBI probe and the legal maneuvers of Assistant U.S. Attorneys Matthew S. Ebert and Harry M. Jacobs.
