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Former NYU administrator John Runowicz was sentenced to one to three years in prison on July 14 after pleading guilty to embezzling over $409,000 from the university.
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Chem swindler faces up to 15 years in jail
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Former NYU chemistry administrator John Runowicz.
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The former chemistry department budget director was indicted last December for submitting liquor store receipts from Warehouse Wines on Broadway that he found in the trash. He was charged with grand larceny and the falsification of business records.
Coinciding with his judgment, Runowicz returned $39,000 to the university from his retirement account. Runowicz's lawyer and NYU School of Law alumnus Daniel Parker said returning the money may have reduced his sentence.
"In all cases, there's always a middle ground and we seemed to find it in this case," he said. "Given who Mr. Runowicz is and given the nature of the crime, we reached a reasonable plea bargain."
Parker said he was pleased with Runowicz's final sentence. Manhattan Supreme Court judge Richard Carruthers made the ruling.
"He was never going to get 15 years," he said. "No first-time offender who has led a crime-free life who ends up making a mistake, even of this nature, in a non-violent way who then accepts responsibility by pleading guilty, in my experience, is going to get the maximum, nor should he."
NYU spokesman John Beckman said the university's Financial Operations Division had been in the process of strengthening controls and automating payments by the time Runowicz' activities were referred to prosecutors.
However, Runowicz was not the first person to abuse the university's reimbursement system. In April 2007, former CAS student council president Meredith Dolgin resigned after it was reported that she had violated compensation policies. That same year Dolgin was accused of tampering with university elections.
NYU now processes employee reimbursements electronically and asks for additional information when reimbursing students' paper requests.
Beckman said the new automated process would let the university better track and audit requests.
"Along with this, new financial control reports have been developed that detect patterns of activity, by evaluating such data as dollar volume and number of reimbursements received by individuals, as well as dollar volume and number of reimbursements by authorized approvers within the university," he said.
