Occasionally there are scenarios where all the players are villains and you hope everyone loses. This isn’t quite that…but for some people it’s going to be close.
Many, many people hate their Homeowner’s Association (HOA). It’s not unusual for this hatred to come from petty tyrants on the board or petty snitches reporting their neighbors. As a simple example, a lot of years ago we put up our Christmas tree early. Like the first of November early. We were going to be traveling a lot during the holidays and options were early or late, so we put it up early. This was the Christmas tree INSIDE our house. It was visible in the front window, but it was in our house. Someone complained to the HOA board. My wife happened to be at the meeting. Long story short, the Christmas tree stayed up as a giant middle finger symbol of the holidays.
There is no evidence that David Efrem Katz, 56 was trying to stick it to the HOA, but boy did he do it on a grand scale. Katz was the CFO of Durand and Associates (D&A), a property management company that primarily serviced HOAs. Between 2012 and 2017 Katz stole $3 million from his company and customer HOA’s.
Katz started as an accountant in 1998 eventually rising to CFO in 2012. Katz’s base salary was a miserly $47,500 so Katz went a head and paid himself $6,500 every two weeks. Essentially more than tripling his salary.
I have to give Katz credit. Once he was in, he was all in. Katz opened credit cards in the company’s name and put personal expenses on them. He took out a loan in the company’s name. He reimbursed himself for expenses never incurred. All of this was done with company funds, and according to the indictment, client HOA funds as well.
Katz hid the expenses with false entries, no surprise. I do want to stop and look at this. Katz committed payroll fraud, loan fraud, credit card fraud, expense reimbursement fraud. He really went all in. This is up there Myeong-se Oh from ABB South Korea who factored company receivables to get more money to steal.
I wasn’t able to find out how he was caught, but the fraud lasted through 2017 and Katz finally plead guilty in 2023.