A Toronto Police civilian employee is facing 22 new charges after an investigation into files which were allegedly accessed illicitly.

Between February and September 2014, police allege a female clerk in the Forensic Identification Service conducted unauthorized searches of police databases. They said these searches were not for “official police business.”

On Wednesday, the TPS Professional Standards unit charged Erin Maranan, 28, of Thornhill with 20 counts of breach of trust, one charge of perjury and one charge of personation. In July, she was charged with two counts of breach of trust.

Maranan appeared in court on Wednesday. A publication ban was imposed on the proceedings.

Daniel Brown, a Toronto lawyer who does not represent Maranan, explained the “very serious allegations” against her.

The perjury charge is an indictable offence, meaning it is in a category of more serious offences, said Brown.

“(It is levied) if you lie having sworn that what you’ve written or said is the truth, and they can prove that you lied,” he explained. The maximum punishment is 14 years in jail.

The maximum punishment for personation — pretending to be someone else as a means to gain an advantage or avoid some sort of problem — is 10 years, he said.

Breach of trust charges might be laid against someone who has used their authority to access information they wouldn’t be able to access otherwise, he said.

“It doesn’t always have to be fraud or something that would amount to a criminal offence outside a work context,” he said. The maximum punishment for breach of trust is five years in jail.

According to the TPS website, civilian clerks hired into the Forensics Identification Services are to perform roles such as fingerprint technician or photo imaging technician. Duties also include “processing, searching, comparing and identifying fingerprints for crime-scene identification and criminal record purposes,” providing professional photographic and digital imaging services to all units, and maintaining section files.

With files from Laura Beeston

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