The former chief financial officer at ThermoEnergy Corp., which focused on wastewater treatment and power generation technologies while based in Little Rock until late 2011, was convicted Thursday of pocketing nearly $110,000 in company funds and failing to remit $1.9 million in payroll taxes to the government.
Andrew Thurman Melton, 69, spent 2½ days on trial before a federal jury, which took about an hour to convict him on all 17 counts he faced -- 12 counts of mail fraud and five counts of failing to submit payroll taxes.
When sentenced at a later date, Melton faces possible prison time and will be required to make restitution of $109,575.80 to cover the unauthorized personal expenses. After firing Melton, the company hired a tax lawyer who resolved the payroll-tax issue with the IRS.
Jurors found that Melton defrauded the company and the federal government over about four years, from 2005 through 2009, by using company funds to make a personal wage-garnishment payment of $3,100 a month, while using a company credit card to charge cruises, trips, clothes, skin-care products, dietary products, furs, jewelry, veterinary expenses, medical expenses and home utility payments.
Melton said he and other officials at the company were authorized to charge personal expenses to the company. He said he often used his own funds to pay business expenses, so it all evened out.
But some of those other officials testified that Melton took advantage of the leeway he was given, accruing extensive unauthorized charges while quietly draining funds that they believed were being set aside to cover payroll taxes.
Dennis Cossey, ThermoEnergy's chief executive officer and chairman of the board of directors, testified that he hired Melton in 2005 to replace the previous chief financial officer, who had died. He said Melton had been a member of the board since 1996 or 1997, as well as a member of the audit committee.
Cossey said Melton was paid an annual salary of $200,000, with regular increases up to $500,000, and was given an opportunity to earn large bonuses every year. He said Melton also had company-paid health care and that the company covered his moving expenses from Texas to Little Rock.
The company later learned that among the "moving expenses" for which Melton reimbursed himself was $8,500 for tile work in his new house and $13,000 to have a wrought-iron fence installed.
Cossey said he was "stunned" when an outside auditor alerted him in 2009 that the company's withholding taxes hadn't been paid for some time. He said he asked Melton about it, and Melton eased his concerns by saying he was aware of the situation and was working with the IRS to iron everything out. But a federal agent testified later that there were no indications Melton had ever contacted the IRS.
Cossey testified that Melton told the board of directors that he had filed all the necessary forms with the IRS to postpone the payroll-tax payments, but that he had actually downloaded forms from the Internet, then crossed out the date imprinted on the forms to make it look like he had filed them earlier.
Mike Barron, an auditor, testified that questions began arising in 2009 when a lack of documentation for a $9,350 check written on the company's account prompted auditors to examine multiple payments Melton made on the company's account for the previous year. He said auditors discovered that Melton had been hiding the monthly $3,102 garnishment payments, made out to a law firm hired to collect the debt, by interspersing records of those checks with the records of legitimate checks the company wrote to other attorneys.
At first, Barron said, auditors couldn't figure out what the $3,102 payments were for, but they finally came across a notation on one that read "garnishment," and dug deeper to find that there was a garnishment judgment against Melton.
Metro on 02/26/2016