ERP Fraud Files, Part 12: The CFO Who Deleted 3,800 Credit Card Charges From the Expense System
More than 3,800 company credit card charges were deleted from an expense-reporting system, and the person who deleted them was the chief financial officer. Tina Feuerstein, 53, of Hanover, Pennsylvania, ran finance at a Pennsylvania subsidiary of a Chicago-area company. A federal jury in Chicago convicted her on April 9, 2026, of eight counts of wire fraud after a four-day trial. Sentencing was set for August 26, 2026, and none of the sources used here report the outcome.
What happened
Prosecutors say Feuerstein used a company credit card for personal spending over roughly five years, more than $1 million in all, much of it on luxury furniture and designer clothing. The charges were the easy part. A card issuer bills what it bills. The hard part was the paper trail inside her own company, so she deleted the charges from the expense-reporting system and falsified entries in the general ledger to cover what was left.
Then she prepared consolidated financial statements that, according to the government, misrepresented the company's expenses. Those statements went up to the owners.
Evidence at trial also showed that she had previously embezzled more than $250,000 from another employer.
Why the gap existed
Most earlier cases in this series involved someone getting past a control or around one. This one is simpler. The person responsible for the books also had the ability to remove records from the system that was supposed to check spending against them. Deleting a charge from an expense report doesn't change what the card issuer billed. It changes what the company sees, and if the only record management reads is one she could edit, her edits are the record.
A subsidiary makes that worse in a particular way. Consolidated statements travel upward to owners who rely on the finance function to tell them what happened, and at this company the finance function was her. The sources don't say who, if anyone, reviewed her own card activity.
They also don't say whether anyone at the subsidiary or its parent knew about the earlier theft when she was hired.
Controls that would have caught it
Delete rights removed from anyone who holds a card or posts to the ledger. An expense line that has to come out gets voided or reversed, with the original preserved, a reason code, and a second person's approval. Under that rule, 3,800 deletions would have left 3,800 reversals to look at.
Card issuer statements reconciled by someone outside accounting. The issuer's monthly statement is the one document she couldn't edit. Match it line by line against the expense system and the ledger, and chase every charge that has no counterpart.
Review of the CFO's own spending by someone above the CFO. Whoever approves the finance head's card activity can't report to the finance head. At a subsidiary that probably means the parent's controller or the owner's finance team.
An AI prompt example for ERP fraud detection
This case calls for a query about what is missing, not what is there. Against an ERP's expense management and general ledger modules, paired with the card issuer's transaction feed, a controller or auditor could run something like:
"Compare every transaction on the corporate card issuer's feed against the expense reporting system and the general ledger for the last six years. List each issuer charge that has no matching record, or whose matching record was deleted or voided."
A second query goes after the people with delete access:
"List all deleted or voided expense lines by the user who deleted them, and flag any user who deleted lines on a card assigned to that same user."
Neither asks anyone to guess at motive. Both ask the system to show what used to be there.
The pattern for this series
Part 5 was a controller forging bank statements. Part 7 was a payroll manager keeping separate general ledgers. Part 10 was a bookkeeper editing the school's accounting files. This is the fourth time in the series that the person keeping the books could also edit them, and here the owners upstream read the consolidated version.
Source disclaimer
The case details in this article are drawn from a press release published by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Illinois, a public government source, along with contemporaneous news reporting on the same case. All facts, figures, and quotations describing the case are sourced from those releases and reports. This article reports a jury verdict; a sentencing outcome was not available in the sources used. The analysis of the control gap, the proposed detection controls, and the AI prompt examples are original commentary and are not part of the source material.
References
United States Attorney's Office, Northern District of Illinois. "Former CFO of Chicago-Area Company's Subsidiary Convicted of Embezzlement." Press release, April 2026. https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndil/pr/former-cfo-chicago-area-companys-subsidiary-convicted-embezzlement
CFO Dive. "Ex-CFO embezzled $1M for luxury purchases, Chicago jury finds." https://www.cfodive.com/news/ex-cfo-embezzled-1m-luxury-purchases-chicago-jury-finds/818232/
Patch. "CFO Embezzled $1M From Employer To Buy Designer Clothes, Chicago Jury Finds." https://patch.com/illinois/chicago/cfo-embezzled-1m-employer-buy-designer-clothes-chicago-jury-finds
