Another Reason to Read Before You Sign Anything

Fine Print: Beware of sending severance agreements home with fired employees. The ex-finance chief of a Kansas marketing firm who is serving prison time for embezzlement might still pocket about $75,000 in severance pay, even though she had secretly changed the severance contract.

Laura R. Kreisler pleaded guilty last year to stealing more than $857,000 from Creative Consumer Concepts Inc., or C3, as it’s known in its hometown of Overland Park, Kansas. She was sentenced to seven years in prison.

Case closed? Not really. The embezzlement came to light about a month after she was fired in November 2004 for insubordination. When C3 fired her, the company offered to continue paying her salary for six months. She took the severance contract home and scanned it into her computer and added a provision that would allow her to keep the extra pay even if the firm sued her. Unaware that the contract had been altered, C3’s human resources manager signed it.

But when Kreisler’s thievery was uncovered, C3 cut off the severance pay and wanted back what it already had given her. C3 and Kreisler sued each other. She maintained that just because she changed the contract didn’t mean C3 was off the hook for the money. Recently, a federal judge pointed out that based on Kansas case law, parties to an agreement are generally bound by the contents whether they read it or not.

Luckily for C3, though, the judge ruled in its favor on a technicality: Under C3’s policy, only the chief executive had the authority to execute such a contract. Kreisler’s attorney, Richard Dvorak, says his client plans to appeal the judge’s ruling. C3 CEO Bob Cutler did not return a call seeking comment.

This item originally appeared in Financial Week, a sister publication of Workforce Management.