Melinda Carpio, the Joint Technical Education District employee who embezzled nearly $300,000 from the District, will spend the next 3 years in prison. Carpio pleaded guilty in Pima County Superior Court in July and was sentenced by Judge Richard Nichols on Monday.
The Judge noted that Carpio was well-paid and her acts were a “betrayal’ of the public’s trust.
The charges of four counts of Fraudulent Schemes and Artifices (class 2 felonies), two counts of Theft (class 2 felonies), and 2 counts of Theft (class 3 felonies) against Enrique Carpio, the defendant’s husband, were dropped as part of the plea agreement.
The Pima County Sheriff’s Office began investigating Mr. and Mrs. Carpio after receiving a report from the Chief Financial Officer of Joint Technical Education District (JTED), where Mrs. Carpio was employed as the Accounting Services Manager. The CFO of JTED, in preparing the annual report, noted a discrepancy between a JTED expenditure and the accompanying vendor payment. An internal audit was conducted in which multiple inconsistencies were discovered.
Further investigation revealed that, over the course of three years, Mrs. Carpio had allegedly directed payments to Mr. Carpio under the guise of a variety of fictitious vendors. Upon reviewing bank records obtained during the investigation, detectives confirmed that approximately $300,000.00, allegedly embezzled from JTED, was deposited into Mr. and Mrs. Carpio’s shared bank account. Mrs. Carpio was terminated from her employment.
JTED is a Pima County based public high school district providing free career and technical education to all sophomore, junior, and senior level high school students in Pima County. JTED competes with private enterprise to provide career and technical education to students from public, private, and charter schools, students who are home-schooled, as well as students who either have, or who are in the process of earning, a GED.