Factual background
8 The applicant was born on 27 July 1961. On 11 February1997 she began working in the Sydney office of American Express International Incorporated (Amex) as the Executive Assistant to the Senior Vice President of the Global Corporate Services Department. In 2000 the applicant was issued with a company Corporate Credit Card. Before the issue of this card the applicant had used the Senior Vice President's Corporate Card for business expenses. When she was given her own card, she was informed of the company's policy that the card was to be used for business purposes only and that receipts for all expenditure were to be submitted with any claim. She agreed to be bound by that policy.
9 Each month Amex issued a statement for the expenses incurred on her Corporate Card and she understood that, in accordance with company policy, she was required to complete a Travel Expense Voucher (TEV) in respect of business related expenditure and submit it, together with the relevant receipts, to the Vice President for approval.
10 The procedure was for the Vice President to then review the expenditure on the card, approve it by signing the TEV and to allocate a generic authorisation number to the document, authorising the payments made by the applicant as business expenses. The document was then faxed to a processing unit in India and filed there. This procedure was designed to ensure that no personal transactions were made by employees who used Corporate Cards. Each TEV was allocated to an accountable number at the time of creation, so as to enable it to be identified and linked to a specific Corporate Card Statement.
11 Between the date of issue of the card and the date of her arrest, the applicant spent large amounts on purchases of personal items such as clothing, jewellery, a mobile phone, mobile telephone calls, taxi fares, duty free shopping, sporting goods, photographic equipment, computer equipment, flowers, sporting event tickets, show tickets, restaurants including interstate locations, fuel, leather goods, clothing, luggage, pharmaceutical goods, accommodation, car hire, groceries including gourmet food and liquor, together with various other goods and services. Money was also spent on accommodation at five star hotels in Sydney, interstate and overseas. The applicant purchased airline tickets for herself and her husband and paid for travel expenses and goods and services while overseas.
12 The method employed by the applicant was to claim as valid business expenses on the TEV for the relevant periods, money she had spent on personal items and services. She also created fictitious payments and expenses so as to disguise other personal expenditure which she had incurred on her Corporate Card, which was not the subject of a claim on a TEV. Although this expenditure could not be identified by examining the fraudulent TEVs, it could be identified on the Corporate Card Statements. The applicant then signed the TEV, forged the signature of the Vice President, to whom she reported at the time, and affixed his personal payment authorisation number on the TEV. On some occasions she also forged his initials beside a number of entries on the document. This indicated to the Processing Unit that receipts for those items were either not available or that the Vice President had authorised those payments. This was not the case as the initials had been forged. She would then send a copy of the document to the Processing Unit in India.
13 By forging the signature of the Vice President and using his payment authorisation number, she was able to bypass the Sydney office thereby eliminating the prospect of the discovery of her fraudulent conduct at that location. As a result staff at the American Express Processing Unit in India did not question her TEV submissions, even where receipts were missing or never received, because to the best of their knowledge, the TEV claim had been authorised by the Amex Senior Vice President.
14 Amex has been unable to find any TEVs for legitimately incurred business expenses which were submitted by the applicant between the date of her being issued with the Corporate Credit card in 2000 and the date of her arrest in March 2005. An analysis of the TEVs which were submitted revealed that the applicant did not submit a TEV for every monthly statement issued in respect of the Corporate Card.
15 A comparison of the TEVs with the monthly bank statements showed that, in most cases, one TEV covered several bank statements. By completing one TEV for several statements, the applicant was able to obtain the following benefits: