Well, technically he stole from NBC Universal who bankrolls the production of 30 Rock, but Lorne Michaels and Tina Fey helm the show. I guess, if it has something to do with the creator of Saturday Night Live and the show's former Head Writer, even the embezzlement case must have a bizarre skit flavor.
The media-released facts of this "grand" scam, which yielded the schmuck, formerly employed as an "accountant" on the show, a $13.6K "fortune" in stolen funds, are sketchy (pun is always intended), so I will have to apply my financial forensic expertise and speculate about some of the details.
The way I see it, he caught on the fact that when expense reports/envelopes are submitted for reimbursement, nobody checks the actual receipts inside. It is also possible that he was the very person responsible for checking them. Either way, there were obvious holes in this internal control plot. So, he decided to pad a few envelopes with fictional expenses, personal use of the business credit card and even altered receipts. On top of that, he did it stupidly and sloppily: used whiteout to falsify the receipts, faked the NBC Comptroller's initials. He thought nobody would ever notice. As far as he could see, from his limited to one season and inexperienced point of view (how do these people get employed?), nobody was looking.
Nobody in accounting management did! Judging by the timing of his employment and arrest, it seems the independent auditors were the ones who discovered the receipts with the whiteout!!! In a business with big-shot executive producers charging all kinds of perks (limos, flowers and whatnot) to corporate credit cards, the reconciliation of expense accounts is a sensitive area. That's where diligent auditors would look. And the SLOPPY WHITEOUT – how can anyone possibly miss that?
So, now he is facing up to 7 years in jail. That's a year for every $2,000 he stole. Pretty severe. However, The Frustrated CFO is the most curious about the consequences of this ordeal for the NBC's Comptroller. In my book she is ultimately responsible for the lack of proper internal control procedures and the inadequacy of the budget variance analysis. If those functions were correctly established and executed, this small-time offense, blown out-of-proportion by its show-biz relation, would never have occurred in the first place. Both her and the arrested one are sorry excuses for accountants.
What was the perp's self-justification? Did he think that "it was not fair" for Tina Fey to spend $200 a day in limo charges? IMDb Pro reports her current 30 Rock salary at $300,000 per episode. That must've killed him.
However, we are accountants, so let's count. The show reportedly has 6 million viewers. That's only in the US and doesn't count reruns or DVD sales. So, on the evening of each episode's airing Tina Fey makes 6 million people laugh and forget their worries. (Please, appreciate my objectivity here as I personally don't find Tina Fey's comedy funny, intelligent or entertaining.) And for that she gets paid 5 cents per person. I think that's reasonable. Who did that "accountant" make happy?
The Frustrated CFO 