Older does not always mean wiser. One woman looked to supplement her retirement by stealing more than $1 million.

A 73-year-old woman with no previous criminal record was handed a 21-month jail sentence for stealing more than $1 million from clients of her payroll business. As reported in www.thestarphoenix.com.

The Canadian and near-Octogenarian Geraldine Maloa Williams previously pleaded guilty to theft over $5,000 in relation to a scheme in which almost 40 people, corporations and businesses lost money.

It turns out that Williams had been running a business called Willrun Payroll Services Inc. in Regina which provided services for clients that included figuring out how much clients’ employees owed in taxes, Canada pension and employment insurance and submitting those amounts to Revenue Canada.

When she began to have financial problems with trouble covering her expenses Williams would take advantage of the money coming in from clients by using employees’ CPP and EI contributions to pay her expenses rather than submitting the money immediately to the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA).

Her scheme worked for almost a decade as she created something similar to a Ponzi scheme in which she’d take from new money coming in from clients to pay the CRA the funds owing to in relation to clients whose checks she was already dealing with. But eventually, payments to the CRA weren’t just delayed, they were short or, at times, non-existent.

Was it worth a couple of years behind bars to steal from people? I would guess Williams would choose to take a stop theft class and seek religious training to keep her from violating one of God’s 10 Commandments – thou shalt not steal!