HOLLIDAYSBURG — A Tyrone woman accused of stealing almost $100,000 from the Northern Blair County Regional Sewer Authority has pleaded guilty to a first-degree misdemeanor charge of theft in exchange for five years’ probation.

April L. McElwain, 39, who was fired in November 2015 because of the suspected theft, offered no apology or explanation while rendering her plea Thursday before Blair County Judge Timothy M. Sullivan.

But McElwain did provide a $5,000 check toward the authority’s costs of $24,987 for a forensic audit, handwriting analysis and legal fees. And she pledged, during probation, to submit payments through the county’s cost and fines office to cover the remaining amount.

As for restitution, the authority recovered its loss of $98,690 by filing an insurance claim with Employer’s Mutual Casualty Co. That company is suing McElwain in civil court, defense attorney Steven Passarello advised Sullivan.

District Attorney Richard Consiglio, who was preparing to put McElwain on trial next week, said Thursday that he was glad to resolve the case to the authority’s satisfaction. State police, in October 2016, charged McElwain with felony counts of theft and receiving stolen property.

“This has been a long and drawn-out case,” Consiglio said. “But I think the community should still have faith in its authority. There’s been an admission by the defendant that she was solely guilty … and the authority was farsighted enough to have (insurance) in place which covered its losses.”

Authority Chairman Robert Smith and he and others are satisfied with the resolution.

“The submission of the guilty plea completely absolves all persons other than (McElwain) from any responsibility and satisfies the sewer authority and its board members that this matter is fully resolved,” Smith said.

“What we really wanted,” he added after McElwain rendered her plea, “was for her to acknowledge her responsibility and what she did.”

Authority accountant Patrick Fiore said McElwain engaged in a classic case of check-lapping, a fraudulent accounting tactic. It started in this case, Fiore said, with McElwain’s retention of cash payments from authority customers. Subsequently, he said, she depended on an incoming check or checks to be recorded as revenue and offset the cash she kept. Or when she was short, she allegedly created and signed a fraudulent check. Those efforts permitted the authority’s accounts to retain the appearance of being balanced.

Criminal charges indicate that the acquisition of new accounting software in 2015 helped expose the check-lapping scheme because it required all authority customer payments to be matched to the appropriate customer accounts.

“Her scheme was already starting to implode when we got that software,” authority Manager Susan Bonsell said Thursday. “But it also helped expose what she had been doing.”

Fiore said the authority’s current operations are set up in a way that should prevent reoccurrence.

“Because of the modernization of the billing system and the authority’s accounting system, I can tell you that it will not happen again,” Fiore said. “At least not anytime soon.”

Fiore said McElwain’s scheme lasted as long as it did — over five to six years — because she took amounts that didn’t draw attention and because she was trusted.

“This kind of thing happens only when people break our trust,” he said.

Smith said that the authority invested hundreds of hours of staff time and resources aimed at identifying its losses and resolving the matter.

“Sometimes, you don’t realize how creative someone can be,” Smith said. “When Pat Fiore started to put together what she had done, I found it to be shocking and amazing.”

Mirror Staff Writer Kay Stephens is at 946-7456.