Tarrant County PAC loses nearly $7,000 in check fraud.

DALLAS – The Dallas Morning News reports that onetime Dallas Morning News scribe Dave Levinthal, who now writes for OpenSecrets, spent some time looking into how various political action and candidate election committees have been defrauded during the last election. That would include the Tarrant County Republican Victory Fund PAC, which lost $6,980 in late November after someone swiped a mailed check and changed the recipient’s name and added a six to a $980 check before cashing it. The PAC’s treasurer told Levinthal that while the police were unable to find a suspect, the bank refunded the money because it agreed it shouldn’t have cashed it.

Levinthal says that the problem was pretty pervasive. More than a dozen elected officials and federal political committees lost up to five-figure sums from campaign accounts because of theft. Analysis of federal campaign finance records filed since the November election found the sticky fingers sometimes came in the form of the check swiping that happened in Tarrant County, but also included embezzlement, unauthorized charges, “or other shenanigans.” The Tarrant County GOP says that their accounting procedures caught the issue quickly. But Levinthal says that in many cases, political committees spin up quickly and don’t set up proper internal controls and practices, which makes them an attractive to thieves.