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DPS employee sentenced
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Posted on Dec 06 2000
A Department of Public Safety clerk was sentenced yesterday to four months imprisonment and four months home detention on wire fraud charge after illegally using government account for long-distance calls.
U.S. District Judge Alex R. Munson also ordered Trina G. Taisacan, 24, of Rota, to pay the CNMI government close to $20,000 in restitution for the crime that occurred in a span of nearly two years.
The defendant, who will be placed on supervised release for three years after serving jail time, expressed remorse for her action.
After spending four months in a federal prison, she will be under home confinement that will include electronic monitoring to trace her whereabouts.
She will be restricted to her residence for four months except for employment, education and other activities pre-approved by the probation officer.
Ms. Taisacan copped a plea agreement last July with federal prosecutors following the filing of the criminal case involving unauthorized use of the DPS phone account on Rota where she used to work.
She admitted incurring phone bills between $10,000 to $20,000 that were paid by the CNMI government for making several overseas calls and allowing others to use the account entrusted to her by the DPS.
Based on court documents, her unlawful phone calls began from January 1997 until its discovery on November 30, 1999. On May 27 last year, Ms. Taisacan made many unauthorized personal long-distance calls from Rota to Oregon, using the official DPS telephone credit calling card.
Many times during this period, she gave out the account number to several unauthorized individuals with the intent to let them use the same for personal calls at the expense of the CNMI government.
Because of the disclosure, many of those individuals also provided the same account number to other people who “further abused the calling card,” the complaint said. (BS)
