WASHINGTON - Marcia Anderson, 47, of Silver Spring, Maryland, was sentenced today to a term of 36 months in prison for her theft of over $500,000 from the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), announced U.S. Attorney Jeffrey A. Taylor.

Anderson received her sentence in U.S. District Court before the Honorable Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who also ordered that the defendant pay restitution in the amount of $560,772.45. Anderson entered a guilty plea in April 2008, to one count of wire fraud in connection with this theft.

According to the statement of facts presented at the plea hearing, from 2001 to 2007, Marcia Anderson was employed by WMATA as a supervisor in the Transit Sales Office, where she oversaw the activities of ten to fifteen transit sales clerks who worked at three sales windows in Washington, D.C. Anderson, who earned an annual salary of between $42,000 and $49,747 during this period, was responsible for the collection of and accounting for cash that was generated from the sale of Metro Fare Media – i.e., bus tokens, student passes, senior citizen passes, and Metro Fare Cards.

According to WMATA’s policies at the time, members of the public could purchase Metro Fare Media using either cash or “Metrocheks” for payment. “Metrocheks” are electronic coded cards in denominations of $1, $5, $10, $20 and $30 that are provided by employers in the Washington, D.C. metro area to their employees as a benefit. When a transit sales clerk received payment for Metro Fare Media by Metrochek, he stapled the Metrochek to the transaction receipt and then placed the cancelled Metrochek into his cashier drawer. Other than the staple holes in a cancelled Metrochek, there was nothing that distinguished a Metrochek that had been used in this manner from any other Metrochek. Metrocheks cancelled in this manner were sent to the WMATA treasury where they should have been destroyed.

Instead, beginning in 2001 and continuing until October 10, 2007, Anderson devised and executed a scheme to steal cash from the transit sales clerks’ cashiers drawers by taking the cash and replacing it with cancelled Metrocheks that should have been destroyed by the WMATA treasury. Routinely, Anderson stole up to two thousand dollars in cash from a transit sales clerk's cashier drawer, and substituted up to two thousand dollars worth of cancelled Metrocheks into the drawer. Anderson covered up her thefts by making false journal entries into WMATA’s accounting system. She also falsified her cashiers’ "end-of-day balance sheets" – which detailed the clerks’ daily transactions – in order to cover-up the evidence of her thefts.

After finalizing these reports, she faxed copies from Washington, D.C. to WMATA’s treasury office located in Alexandria, Virginia, where it was used to verify the sales and cash that had been sent via WMATA carrier to the WMATA treasury office each day. In addition to having faxed paper copies of the reports to WMATA’s treasury office, no less than twice per week, Anderson sent via the WMATA computer internet system an electronic journal from Washington, D.C. to the WMATA treasury in Alexandria, Virginia.

From 2003 until the October 19, 2007, on a continuous and routine basis, Anderson made large deposits into bank accounts that she owns or otherwise controls. Specifically, from December of 2003 through the present, Anderson deposited at least $400,000 into accounts she owns over and above the direct deposit of her salary from WMATA. In 2006, Anderson purchased a $37,000 BMW with additional funds received during the perpetration of her scheme.

On October 10, 2007, law enforcement officials from the United States government and WMATA executed a search warrant at Anderson’s home. At that time, officials recovered 210 Metro fare cards, $3,250.00 in U.S. currency, and a bundled pack of Metrocheks with a piece of paper containing a notation “2029" on it (the approximate amount of funds which had been removed from the WMATA sales office the week before the search warrant had been executed).

As a result of Anderson scheme, she was able to steal $560,722 belonging to WMATA.

In announcing today’s sentence, U.S. Attorney Taylor commended Cedric Mitchell of WMATA Police, Investigator Duncan Templeton of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Maria Couvillon of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, Legal Assistant Latoya Wade of the U.S. Attorney’s Office who assisted in the investigation of this matter, and Assistant U.S. Attorneys Diane Lucas, Jocelyn Ballantine, Fred Yette and former Assistant U.S. Attorney Anthony Alexis.