Friday, October 31, 2014

Indianapolis Public Library Embezzler Lied On Job Application To Get Job At Indiana University

Juanita L. Mimms
Call 6's Kara Kenney followed up on a report Advance Indiana exclusively brought to you in which we revealed that a former accountant of the Indianapolis Public Library who pleaded guilty in 1988 to embezzling nearly a half million dollars through a late book return fine-skimming scam later landed a well-paid job in contract procurement at Indiana University's IUPUI campus. That discovery was made by a local fraud examiner, Greg Wright, while doing research for a book on long-term embezzlers. Juanita Mimms, who went by Juanita Hoagland at the time of her conviction, abruptly resigned her more than $55,000 a year job at IU after Advance Indiana's report was first published. Kenney's further investigation has uncovered the fact that Mimms lied on her application in 1998 when she applied for a clerical job with help from a friend of her former husband.

Mimms told Kenney during a telephone interview that she could not recall whether she disclosed her 1988 felony embezzlement conviction. She also told her that her job did not involve handling any money. When Kenney obtained Mimms' personnel records through a public records request, she learned that Mimms had checked "No" next to a question on her job application asking her if she had ever been convicted of a crime. Kenney also learned that Mimms' job as a diversity coordinator assisting minority and female-owned businesses in contracting opportunities with the university required her to maintain expense reports, manage billing and invoice payments and maintaining records for department expenses. Mimms similarly lied to Wright when he first contacted about her past. During a telephone interview with Wright, Mimms lied about her prior employment by the Indianapolis Public Library, her date of birth; she even denied she formerly went by the name Juanita Hoagland, a fact Wright proved by obtaining her 1989 marriage record.

As Advance Indiana previously reported, Mimms only had to repay about $22,000 of the money prosecutors could prove she stole from the library after reaching an agreement with her when she filed for bankruptcy in 2004, at least five years after she started working for IU. Her fraud was uncovered by State Board of Accounts examiners who believe that her fraud had started many years earlier but records no longer existed to prove theft of public funds during those years. Mimms served only about six months of the three-year prison sentence she received under the terms of her plea agreement. According to Kenney, The Public Integrity Coalition, a newly-formed group by the Indiana Attorney General's Office, is looking at a way to connect local governments and school districts to a list of former public employees who have misappropriated public funds to use in making better-informed hiring decisions. The State Board of Accounts recently announced it would no longer audit some local governmental entities, including library districts, because of state budget cuts over the past ten years that have forced it to slash its staff.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Would this news be discovered if not for Advance Indiana? Not so much I am thinking. And what the heck is wrong with IUPUI’s HR Department? If Welsh can discover that IU hired a convicted liar such as Mimms/Hoagland, why can’t the IUPUI HR Department do similarly?

So many HONEST qualified local persons needing meaningful employment and IUPUI- the benefactor of City largess- hires an admitted embezzler.

IU is graduating boatloads of students with thousands in student loan debt in a market where theses graduates' degrees are often meaningless and IU/IUPUI hires a real doll like Mimms/Hoagland.

Heads should roll at this utter incompetence.

Anonymous said...

Thanks to our city council and mayor, you can't include a question about an employee's prior convictions under their "ban the box" ordinance. Their sloganeering may play well to uninformed voters, but their actions will have serious consequences.

Gary R. Welsh said...

Actually, Greg Wright discovered her hiring, not me.

Anonymous said...

Gary, Please tell your readers that I have been researching long-term embezzlement (8 years & longer). The profile of long-term fraudsters is different than the profile of the short term fraudster. Try to imagine the type of person that comes to work every day for ten years and steals from her employer. Almost all long-term embezzlers are female. More later.

Greg Wright, CFE

Anonymous said...

If the Ballard Boys only walked off with what Juanita did, we'd have money to repave every street in the City.

This is the kind of stuff that I think we're all forced to accept with minimal complaint if we want people to return to being functioning members of society.

One corporate bankruptcy screws over far more people than Juanita.

Anonymous said...

Look at the Library Board and pay to players. Kara and Gary...what a great team...Waiting on more disclosures of corruption from you two.

Anonymous said...



pAUL kRUSE...

Anonymous said...

Anon 8:26- To conflate the actions/deals/agendas of political hacksters like Greg Ballard with law abiding citizens having no option but to be "forced" to accept re-entry individuals who continue to lie and deceive is a senseless position.

Explain to all of us who obey laws and adhere to ethics and who do not deceive day in and day out for almost a decade how accepting continued intentional dishonest behavior from an admitted embezzler assists these criminal types to be functioning members of society. I do not deny re-entry to those who paid the price and learned the lessons of their illegal past but I fail to see how forced (your word) acceptance of continued dishonest behavior assists an individual to become a "functioning member of society".

And to equate the theft of nearly a half million dollars from the Library- thus economically harming the thousands and thousands of Marion County Library subscribers is every bit an evil as a "corporate bankruptcy screws over far more people than Juanita" (...whatever the heck that means).

Indy Rob said...

An embezzler lied to get another job? I would bring in the auditors to look at the records for the IU job. It is likely that she started embezzling again.

Anonymous said...

If you lie on your job application or resume about something substantial, you should be fired
immediately regardless of how well you have performed the job.

Anonymous said...

9:46, I hate your world. All that matters is how well the job is being done. Results talk. B.S. walks. Qualifications and history don't do the job; doing the job does the job.

If you sneak in, and your employer didn't test your skills prior to hire, well, when it really matters, if you're doing the job, the employer has one one rational response, to be happy that he's getting the full value of the day's wage paid.

No job application will get you Peyton Manning's job. If you lie about your college, but you throw three touchdowns and 400 yards against the Cowboys, you're a millionaire.

Anonymous said...

"It is likely that she started embezzling again."

Do you think the IUPUI Diversity office takes in a lot of receivables?