(CMR) A not guilty verdict has been returned in the case of two Health Services Authority (HSA) security employees who were accused of defrauding the HSA of thousands of dollars in overtime pay for others.
Nick Romano Smith (58) and Dominic Fernando Dacres (42) have been found not guilty on all counts by the six-member jury late this afternoon after a four-week trial.
Dacres has been charged with a single count of obtaining property by deception and Smith with two counts of false accounting and breach of trust.
The Crown alleged that between 1 Jan. and 31 Dec 2017, Dacres and Bruce Barnes submitted fraudulent overtime forms for shifts they did not work. “In simple terms, the Crown’s case is that two security officers, Mr. Dacres and Mr. Barnes, repeatedly submitted claims for overtime payments for shifts they had not worked,” James-Malcolm told the jury of four women and two men.
The Crown held that they even submitted overtime slips when they were not on the island. Smith was the supervisor for the pair and signed off on the slips. Smith faced 33 claims for overtime submitted by Dacres and 14 claims for Barnes. Both were alleged to have received over CI$10,000 in overtime pay. Smith was accused of making the hospital lose almost $100,000 for wages paid to several officers for unscheduled leave. Dacres received several months' worth of pay for unscheduled leave.
Barnes was not charged in the conspiracy despite having been arrested. CMR sources have indicated he's outside the jurisdiction and a warrant is out for his arrest.
In the end, however, the case appears to have been one of the incompetencies of Smith as a supervisor and lack of proper timekeeping systems in place by the HSA. The Crown was never able to explain how Smith benefitted personally from the overtime submissions which were done for security officers under their supervision.
There were substantial questions about the lack of training offered to Smith and why they were not able to provide him with assistance in completing his timesheets electronically. At one point his supervised claimed that just because he did not have a high school education that didn't mean he was incapable of being competent on the job. However, defense attorneys argued many red flags that were ignored by the authority's management.
CMR originally broke the story back in February 2018 when the entire security department was placed on leave. They were eventually arrested and subsequently charged in September 2019.
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