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Membership in the Oregon-Idaho AAA Auto Club numbers 570,000. The club provides emergency road service, travel information and a traveler’s check banking program.
Until January, the accounting supervisor at the AAA office was a Portland gentleman by the name of Paul Herbert Perkins. With earning an annual salary of $31,500, Perkins’ job duties included overseeing the accounting department, supervising employees in the traveler’s check area, coordinating AAA’s monthly reconciliation of financial statements with AAA’s bank and corresponding with AAA’s independent auditors.
Perkins, who is married (Susan), recently purchased a $476,000 home in Northwest Portland. He also bought a $175,300 boat, and his garage holds the family cars: a 1978 Ferrari, a 1994 Ford Explorer, a 1996 GMC Suburban and a 1993 Lexus.
Perkins had worked for AAA for nine years when a company vice president noted in late 1996 that the accounting department had not reconciled its bank records for any months of that year. When it was discovered that many of the bank statements were missing, replacements were ordered. Then the replacements began to come up missing.
When company officials looked deeper, they found a teeny-tiny little discrepancy in the books — $2.6 million was missing for the year 1996. Going back a little further, they discovered $1.2-million discrepancy in the 1995 records. When Perkins was interviewed in December by AAA’s attorney, he (Perkins) denied knowing anything about the discrepancies in the financial records. After the interview, Perkins left for the day and never returned to work. A notice of termination was mailed to him in January 1997.
The continuing investigation into the missing millions revealed stacks of American Express traveler’s checks made out to Perkins or to a bar that Perkins’ owned in downtown Portland. The checks totaled about $500,000. When investigators attempted to check the actual hard-copy records, they discovered that Perkins had gone to the storage center and signed out several boxes of records from 1993 to 1996 that he’d never returned.
On January 29, AAA called the FBI. A search of Perkins’s property produced many of the missing records. Although no arrests have yet been made, authorities are looking to the $31,500-a-year accountant for some plausible answers. Stay tuned …
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