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Show DATC employee guilty of fraud By CHERIE HUBER Clipper Correspondent Catherine Gibson Pierce, 46, a former financial aid technician at the Davis Applied Technology Center, has been found guilty on ten of eleven charges that came from her activities in a scheme to embezzle embez-zle federal student aid funds. Pierce, who was brought back to Utah from Pensacola, Fla. where she now lives, was charged in a 12-count 12-count indictment with falsifying DATC documents that led to the issuance is-suance of six checks that ranged in value from $1 12 to $945. The checks were made out to DATC students. She later cashed the checks. The activity took place over a two-year period from 1987 to 1989. U.S. District Judge Aldon Anderson dropped one of the 12 counts because prosecutors could not locate a sixth witness. Five former DATC students testified at the trial that they did not request or expect the checks, did not receive them and had not signed them. The checks had been endors ed with their names and cashed. Timothy Hermsen, a special agent in the inspector general's office of-fice of the Department of Education, Edu-cation, testified he found a correlation correla-tion between the checks and a series of cash deposits in Pierce's bank account. An expert witness, Howard Thiede, who had also worked for the U.S. Department of Education as a criminal investigator, testified the forged signatures on the DATC checks in question matched handwriting hand-writing samples provided by the defendant. Sentencing for Pierce will be Feb. 6 in Salt Lake City at the Federal Fed-eral Building, according to Jack Shell of the DATC. |