Former Montgomery Public Schools employee convicted of theft of over $291,000

Brenda Palmer/Source: Montgomery County Detention Facility

A former official with Montgomery Public Schools has been convicted of four counts related to theft of property.

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall says former MPS Interim Chief School Financial Officer Brenda Palmer has pleased guilty to two felony ethics charges and two felony counts of lying to the attorney general’s office about a matter under investigation.

Palmer’s trial was set to begin Monday.

Palmer had previously been convicted of first-degree theft of property and will be sentenced as a habitual felony offender, Marshall said.

According to Marshall, Palmer facilitated a fraudulent billing scheme that deceived MPS out of $291,367 between November 2017 and April 2019. Her accomplice, Walter James, the former vice-principal of Jefferson Davis High School (now JAG), pleaded guilty in both state and federal court for his role and is serving a a five-year prison term.

Marshall says James submitted fraudulent invoices from nearly a dozen non-existent companies that purported to provide various MPS entities with books, professional development and other goods or services. He says Palmer used her position to ensure they were paid without attracting attention. Palmer forged at least two employees’ names on checks and other written instruments and told subordinate employees to work overtime to prepare legitimate checks so that the fraudulent ones would be less likely to be noticed, according to Marshall.

Palmer then pulled out the fraudulent checks from the legitimate ones so that James could pick them up personally. After James deposited the checks into his Navy Federal Credit Union account, he paid Palmer with cash in the amounts she demanded, as documented by text messages between the two, Marshall said.

When examiners with the Alabama Department of Examiners of Public Accounts began their yearly audit of the MPS system in 2019, they requested supporting documents for many of the fraudulent checks. Palmer was asked to help produce some of those check files. Instead of providing those check files, Palmer shredded them and claimed that she bypassed procedures because she just wanted to get vendors paid. When confronted by the new CSFO, Palmer resigned, walking away with her pension, which she earned until pleading guilty, he said.

Marshall said Palmer lied repeatedly to the attorney general’s office about her knowledge of the scheme, her role in the scheme, her relationship with Walter James and virtually every other aspect of the state’s investigation. Marshall says unbeknownst to her, James had begun cooperating with state and federal authorities and agreed to record a phone call with Palmer. During that call, Palmer instructed James to not send text messages, to tell authorities that certain addresses for the fraudulent companies used to exist, that he didn’t see her when he got the bogus checks, and “to put [the crime] on the white boy,” an innocent third party who worked in the Accounts Payable Department of MPS, according to Marshall.

A sentencing hearing for Palmer will be held at 1:30PM on October 3, 2023, before Montgomery County Circuit Judge James Anderson. Because Palmer is a habitual felony offender, she faces ten years to 99 years on the two ethics charges, and two years to 20 years on the lying charges. The State will be seeking prison time, but Marshall says Palmer’s counsel indicated that they intend to seek a community-corrections sentence, a form of alternative punishment that would permit Palmer to avoid prison or jail.

— Information from the Office of Attorney General Steve Marshall