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A WOMAN who stole nearly $290,000 while working as the office manager at a Thornton noise and vibration consultancy firm will spend the next 12 months in home detention, but will not serve any time in jail. Jodi Leigh Higginbottom, 46, of Woodberry, was tasked with handling the financial duties, including payment to creditors, during her seven years as the office manager at Global Acoustics, a consultancy business specialising in minimising noise. But for nearly six years between 2012 and when her employment was terminated in 2018, Higginbottom made 95 fraudulent transactions from the company's bank account into several of her own, disguising the payments as legitimate transfers to a company Global Acoustics previously had business with and also hiding the individual transfer details of the payments on the company's bank statements. The total amount Higginbottom fraudulently transferred to her own accounts was $288,812. And court documents show that as the fraud went undetected, Higginbottom became more brazen and emboldened in her operation, with the amounts she stole increasing each year from 2012 to 2016. In 2012, she stole $20,680, $25,300 in 2013, $35,200 in 2014, $41,800 in 2015 and $69,692 in 2016. She transferred a further $68,200 in 2017 and another $27,940 in 2018, before her employment was terminated on June 15, 2018, due to unrelated issues. The payments ranged from $440 up to $4400. It was only when Global Acoustics' expenditure information for the 2017/18 financial year was supplied to an accountancy firm in January, 2019, that the fraudulent payments were first identified. The accountancy firm said there was unaccounted expenditure that they needed more information on and the office manager who took over from Higginbottom asked Global Acoustics' sole director if he knew anything about a series of unexplained payments made to the company Bayvia Pty Ltd. Each of the payments were within a 'multiple payment' to creditors, when multiple transfers of money are submitted as one and appear as a single line on bank statements with the individual transfer details hidden. Bayvia is a legitimate business that Global Acoustics had previously made payments to, but when the director compared Bayvia's BSB and account number to the transfers of money, he realised the payments were actually being made into Higginbottom's personal bank accounts. She pleaded guilty to seven counts of dishonestly obtaining a financial advantage by deception and in Maitland Local Court on Thursday was sentenced to a two-year intensive corrections order, including 12 months of home detention.

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