A B.C. woman who defrauded her employers of hundreds of thousands of dollars to fuel “extravagant” spending has been sentenced to seven years in prison, according to a recent court decision. Megan Katherine O’Gorman pleaded guilty to two counts of fraud over $5,000 and was sentenced in Kelowna provincial court last month, where a judge described her as someone whose “relationship with the truth has always been tenuous.” O’Gorman defrauded two companies of a combined $522,305.31 while working in their accounting departments between 2016 and 2018, the court heard. She got both jobs by saying she was a chartered professional accountant, despite never having obtained a degree or any formal qualifications. “To date, Ms. O’Gorman has not repaid one cent of what she stole from the victims,” the judgment said. While working for Refresh Financial Inc., she made roughly 860 unauthorized transactions using company credit cards, forged the CEO’s signature on nearly 100 cheques and reimbursed herself for expenses she never incurred, the court heard. In total, she defrauded the company of $395,776.87. After being fired, she got a new job almost immediately with a real estate development company called High Street. There, she used the company credit card to transfer money into her own account to the tune of $126,528.44, according to the decision. The motive for the fraud was one factor considered aggravating in the case. “Ms. O’Gorman committed the offences for no other reason than greed,” Judge Andrew Tam wrote. “The credit-card statements filed show a lavish lifestyle of taking airplane trips, renting cars, and staying in fancy hotels. She bought furniture and ate at nice restaurants. She paid her own rent. She spent over half a million dollars in just under two years. This pace of spending was nothing short of extravagant.” However, the factor the judge said was “one of the most—if not the most—aggravating” was O’Gorman’s criminal record. “It would be an understatement to say that Ms. O’Gorman has an unenviable past. As early as a teenager, she started shoplifting. When she worked at Staples, she stole from the store,” Tam wrote. “Her adult offending is chronicled in her criminal record, which has 12 convictions, almost all of which are property/dishonesty related.” O’Gorman, 35 at the time of sentencing, told the court she had been in jail or bound by court conditions her entire adult life. The judge noted O’Gorman was bound by a conditional sentence order, which prohibited her from working or volunteering in any position where she would be “acting as treasurer in relation to real property, money or valuable security of another person.” Her criminal record also shows two convictions for fraud over $5,000 from October of 2021, where she was sentenced to federal prison and ordered to pay nearly $1 million in restitution. The guilty pleas in the case, while considered mitigating, were given less weight because they came on the eve of the trial. The judge also noted that while the taxpayers have been spared the expense of a trial, O’Gorman did “abscond” to Alberta twice before sentencing. “Any savings to the system in not having a trial may have been spent in her transport back to British Columbia twice,” Tam wrote. O’Gorman has been in custody since fall of 2024. The judge accepted Crown’s submission on sentencing, handing O’Gorman a five-year prison term for defrauding Refresh and a two-year term for defrauding High Street. After credit for time served, the sentence works out to an additional four years and eight months behind bars. O’Gorman has also been ordered to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in restitution and banned for life from working or volunteering in “any capacity” that gives her access to or control over other people’s property, money or valuables.
