TOOELE UTAH (ABC4 News) - Prosecutors and a Judge are shaking their heads over an accounting system that made it ripe for abuse.
The discovery was made during a court hearing this week following the arrest of an employee of a Tooele pharmacy.
Cami Cooley is facing theft charges for allegedly stealing close to a hundred thousand dollars.
She was an employee of the Stansbury Park health clinic run by University Healthcare.
In transcripts obtained by ABC4 NEWS, Judge Stephen Henroid sounded incredulous that this went undetected.
“What’s the problem here?” he asked.
And those were the same sentiments expressed by prosecutor Gary Searle.
“It took 19 months before someone says ‘holy crap?’, that’s a lot of money,” Searle said during the court hearing.
An auditor for the University Healthcare was brought in to verify the amount lost.
“We currently do not have a cash register system that ties to our pharmacy inventory system,” Mary Watson testified. “It’s something we are hopefully getting soon. Right now we do not have that.”
The University Healthcare network has ten clinics scattered throughout the Wasatch front.
And Watson testified that all clinics are run the same way.
A spokesman for University Healthcare said changes are on their way.
"We are moving towards an electronic system where all of this is done electronically,” said Chris Nelson.
He doesn't believe money is missing from other clinics despite the outdated system.
Nelson said the Stansbury clinic was a small clinic and didn't follow guidelines requiring two signatures of the daily receipts.
"She would just sign off on herself which was a problem it was against protocol and we obviously didn't find it quickly enough,” he said.
Controls at all of the university health clinics have been tightened because of the alleged theft. And Nelson said audits are now underway.
"The audits are more in depth tracking over the books over the course of time just to make sure what we think is happening is what's happening,” he said.
Nelson said they have a system to track every drug being prescribed. He said that was never an issue in this case.
None of the money has been recovered and the restitution hearing is attempting to determine how much money was missing.
