The Trial Balance is CFO.com’s weekly preview of stories, stats and events to help you prepare.
Part 1 — An Oregon-based finance chief betrayed the trust of “people who loved her and held her in high esteem,” the state’s assistant U.S. attorney says.
The former CFO of a West Coast fisheries agency will serve eight months in federal prison for taking more than $200,000 from her employer.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Oregon announced the sentencing of Pamela Kahut, previously the CFO of the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission. She will also be subject to three years of supervised release.
The attorney’s office said that between October 2014 and September 2020, Kahut stole $211,083.27 from the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission’s health benefit trust account.
While that account was created to pay benefits for commission employees, prosecutors said Kahut used the money she stole to “pay for her spouse’s long-term care annual premiums, pay off her pension loans, and to pay her credit card bills.”
The attorney’s office noted the health benefit trust account was partially funded through federal grant money. Established in 1947, the Pacific States Marine Fisheries is an agency that “conserves, develops, and manages Pacific Ocean fishery resources” for six West Coast states, including Alaska and Oregon, according to its website.
Kahut was charged with “theft in connection with healthcare” in April and pleaded guilty in June. A 40-year employee of the commission, Kahut “was in many ways the face of this organization,” said Robert Trisotto, assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Oregon, according to The Oregonian’s reporting on last week’s sentencing.
Kahut’s actions betrayed the “people who loved her and held her in high esteem,” Trisotto said, according to the newspaper.
The former CFO’s defense noted that she has paid back the full amount and has no prior criminal record, The Oregonian reported.
The case was investigated by the FBI, alongside the inspector general offices of the U.S. Department of Commerce and the U.S. Department of Energy.
Part 2 — This week
Here’s a list of important market events slated for the week ahead.
Monday, Sept. 8
- Consumer credit, July
Tuesday, Sept. 9
- NFIB optimism index, Aug.
Wednesday, Sept. 10
- Producer price index, Aug.
- Core PPI, Aug.
- Wholesale inventories, July
Thursday, Sept. 11
- Initial jobless claims, week ending Aug. 16
- Consumer price index, Aug.
- Core CPI, Aug.
- Monthly U.S. federal budget, Aug.
Friday, Sept. 12
- Consumer sentiment (preliminary)
Part 3 — Weekly listen: Meta CFO Susan Li
Susan Li, the CFO of Meta, was on the “Glue Guys Podcast” last week to discuss her 17-year career journey at the company and its shifting culture, her childhood and her tradition of reading to her kids each morning over breakfast. The group also said Meta’s leaders encourage continual learning among employees.
“We have a management team that is very intellectually curious and often in ways that will… slightly surprise you. Someone who runs a very technical domain will have far-ranging interests outside of that,” Li said. “I’m pretty comfortable just asking people about something a little bit random but interesting and kind of seeing where the conversation goes.”
Li continued: “It is a team that … really cares about learning, is not afraid to correct previous mistakes. When something doesn’t go the way I want it to, it will weigh on me for a long time. And Mark [Zuckerberg] will say, ‘You made the best decision you could have with the information you had yesterday, and we are making now the best decisions we can with the information we have today.’ We’ve got to be able to always look forward. He is really very sort of clear-eyed about that, and has, in some ways, given me a better perspective also to not just let myself kind of relitigate in my head the things that I could have done better.”
