![]() ![]() Three days later she told then Dixon mayor, Jim Burke, about the suspicious account that Crundwell controlled. Honestly, I thought, ‘Who can I trust?’ ” “I didn’t know if it was something I should go to our police department with. “I didn’t know who to turn to,” she says. So, she folded the bank statement and hid it in the sunglass container in her SUV. Swanson thought she’d discovered fraud, but she wasn’t sure. Well, the city has their own pumps, so I knew it wasn’t a city account.” “That’s when I really started looking at all the debits and credits, like gasoline and things like that. “My first thought was that Rita put a private account under the city’s name because she was buying and selling horses and shielding the money from the IRS,” Swanson says. When she got the bank records, she saw three large deposits - of $200,000, $300,000 and $500,000 into an unknown account called “RSCDA - Reserve Fund” or Reserve Sewer Capital Development Account. “I finally called the bank, and I said, ‘I want every statement of the City of Dixon’s faxed to me in the next five minutes,’ ” Swanson said during a recent interview with Fraud Magazine. ![]() In the past, when the statements were late, Crundwell would advise Swanson to give only the last four digits of the pertinent accounts to email to the bank so it could fax the records to city hall. ![]() And the city’s bank, Fifth Third Bank, hadn’t mailed the statements. The problem was that Crundwell had never enabled the online option for the city’s bank accounts, so Swanson couldn’t view and print the statements. Swanson, the city clerk, had to fill in for Crundwell and prepare the fiscal report for an upcoming council meeting. Crundwell, the comptroller of the city of Dixon, Illinois, and a champion quarter-horse breeder, was out of the office at an equine competition. One phone call in October 2011 irreversibly changed the lives of Kathe Swanson, Rita Crundwell and the citizens of Dixon, Illinois. Kathe Swanson’s life will be forever marked by her simple heroic decision. And then she found a secret account in city ledgers that led to discovery of Comptroller Rita Crundwell’s astounding $53.7 million fraud. The ACFE’s 2018 Sentinel Award recipient had no intention of changing her orderly life as the city clerk of Dixon, Illinois. ![]()
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