Former Minneapolis principal charged with misusing school credit card
MINNEAPOLIS (KMSP) - A former principal has been charged with three counts of theft by swindle after using a school district credit card for personal expenses.
55-year-old Anne DePerry, the former principal of Whittier International School in Minneapolis, made $11,830 worth of purchases that were not school related between December 2013 and September 2015, according to the Hennepin County district attorney’s office.
While conducting a random audit last October, the school district discovered that a charge from an overseas hat store was made on the district credit card. According to the release, the auditor then “looked at six weeks of charges by DePerry and found others that were not for school-related expenses. When the auditor contacted DePerry, she said she must have accidentally used the wrong card and offered to write a check for the $1,700 in charges turned up over that six week period.”
However, the auditor decided to go back and look at the charges and discovered that more than $10,000 in charges were not school related and that $5,440 in charges were “suspicious but could not be completely ruled out as school related.”
The auditor also told police that it was unlikely DePerry could have charged the items by mistake to the school district credit card because any time she used the card, she would have to log into the school district’s system, upload the receipts and add a correct budget code and then click on the approve button. At any of those steps, she would have known she had charged an improper item.
DePerry resigned her position with the school district last November.