The documents in that envelope had my daughter’s name on them. Not as an employee. Not as a customer. As the person receiving payments from the company. I read the first page three times before I understood what I was looking at. There were invoices I’d never seen, transfers I’d never approved, and a second business account connected to the company account where my name appeared as a director. I called the number on the letter and asked what my authority as a director actually allowed me to see. The woman said I had the right to request the company’s complete financial records. Then she added, “You should probably do that before you sign anything else.”
I called my daughter and asked whether she knew about the account. She went silent for so long I thought the call had dropped. Then she asked me what documents I’d received. I told her everything. She said her husband had told her the business was struggling and that he’d been moving money around temporarily to keep suppliers paid. I asked why her name appeared on documents he’d never shown me. She said she didn’t know. Then I asked about the fourteen thousand dollars the supplier was demanding. She said that wasn’t their only debt. There were three more creditors she’d never heard of. I requested the company’s bank statements that afternoon, and the first statement showed something neither of us expected.
For eight months, money had been leaving the business account and going to a personal account in my son-in-law’s name. The amounts were small enough to avoid attracting attention, but they added up to more than sixty thousand dollars. I asked the bank whether my signature was required for those transfers. The manager said no — but my director status gave me access to the account records. Then I found the reason he’d needed me on the paperwork in the first place. The company had been applying for credit using my clean record while he moved the borrowed money somewhere else. And when I looked at the newest creditor statement, there was a payment authorization attached to it. The signature wasn’t mine. It was my daughter’s.
