The former finance director for a healthcare nonprofit in Westchester County, N.Y. has been charged with embezzling more than $700,000 from the agency during a four-year period.
Ingrid Aquino, 31, of Bronx, N.Y., was indicted by a Westchester County, N.Y., grand jury for grand larceny following her arrest by investigators from the Westchester County District Attorney’s Office. Aquino is the former director of finance for Hudson Valley Community Services (HVCS) in Hawthorne, N.Y., a nonprofit that began in 1983 as the first regional healthcare organization to serve clients in seven counties who live with or are at risk of contracting illnesses that include AIDS and sexually-transmitted diseases.
HVCS now is a division of Cornerstone Family Healthcare, with the same mission of connecting clients to healthcare, education and prevention. HVCS serves more than 3,500 clients and has about 110 employees.
At the time of the 2021 merger between HVCS and Cornerstone, an accounting firm found “significant deficiency” in internal financial controls maintained by HVCS, according to information in the accounting report.
Aquino allegedly wrote more than 150 checks from the organization’s accounts, payable to herself and her husband, between November 2017 and September 2021, according to Westchester County District Attorney Miriam E. Rocah.
Aquino was arraigned on the indictment, released on her own recognizance, and is due in State of New York County Court on May 31. She is being represented by a Legal Aid Society attorney in Westchester County, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Aquino allegedly admitted to investigators that she issued “the checks to herself, without permission and authority, while working for HVCS.”
According to court records, Aquino “confessed to the larceny and explained the details of how she issued the checks to herself and attempted to cover up the larceny in HVCS’s electronic ledger system.”
The arrest and indictment were based on information provided by HVCS employees and records kept by an auditing company, Cornerstone Healthcare, Orange Bank & Trust, JP Morgan Chase, and three additional banks, according to the criminal complaint.
A representative of Cornerstone Family Healthcare did not respond to a request for comment.
