Accountant Stole $2M From Central Queens Company, Queens DA Says

MASPETH, QUEENS — The accountant of a central Queens demolition company was charged with embezzlement last week for allegedly stealing $2 million dollars from the organization, the Queens DA announced.

Vedeyah Badal, 56, worked as an accountant for Titan Industrial Services Inc. for 22 years — during eight of which she added more than one-dozen fake employees to the payroll in order to cash $2 million worth of checks for herself, wrote the DA in a news release.

Earlier this month, on Thursday April 22, Badal was charged with first degree grand larceny, second degree money laundering, and charges for falsifying business records. If convicted, she faces up to 25 years in prison.

Hundreds of fake checks

In 2019, when Badal left the company, someone discovered three nonexistent employees who were getting paid weekly.

A larger audit found a total of 13 fake employees, all of whom were allegedly created by Badal between 2012 and 2019.

According to the audit, hundreds of checks — amounting to $2 million — were written by the company to the fictitious employees, and then deposited into Badal’s bank account.

Queens District Attorney Katz called this scheme a “complicated con,” noting in the news release that Badal got away with embezzlement for so many years because she was a “trusted employee” with “virtually unlimited control over the business’s finances.”

In addition to the $2 million in losses from fake paychecks, Titan Industrial Services Inc. lost another $1 million in taxes through Social Security, disability, and Medicare contributions from the fake employees checks.

The DA reported that in addition to fictitious personas, the fake workers had fake Social Security Numbers and were having federal, state, and local taxes withheld from their paychecks.

A company already in trouble

This is not the first time that Titan Industrial Services Inc. — also known as Titan Industrial Services Corp. — has appeared in the news.

In a fatal construction accident in 2019, incidentally the same year that Badal left the company, a wall fell in a Manhattan synagogue, where Titan Industrial had been issued permits for “emergency stabilization work.”

The family of the man who was crushed by the wall filed a lawsuit against the building’s owners, and Titan Industrial, arguing that the wall that fell was not properly stabilized in 2019.

The Platta Law Firm, who represented the dead man’s family, did not immediately respond to Patch for comment about what happened in the case.