Written by Robert Garofano in September, 2007

Former PricewaterhouseCoopers (“PwC”) accounting services clerk, Heather MacNeil-Brown was jailed on the 19 June 2007 for stealing $920,239 over a four and a half year period and gambling it at Melbourne’s Crown Casino.

MacNeil-Brown committed the offences between 2000 and 2005 while working in the Corporate Advisory and Restructuring Division of PricewaterhouseCoopers. She managed to misappropriate “…94 cheques from administrations being conducted by PwC” before she left the company in 2005 (Drummond, 20 June 2007).

After initially spending the money at small pokies venues in Melbourne, MacNeil-Brown decided to hit Crown Casino, where she became a regular “high roller” at the Crown’s Mahogany Room.

Judge Frank Dyett believed that Crown should begin to ensure the money used by its big spending guests was in fact theirs. The judge believed the onus should be placed on the gaming venue to make “reasonable inquiries to ensure that large sums of money continually being lost by regular customers…are emanating from legitimate sources” (Drummond, 20 June 2007). The judge went further by explaining that should the gaming venue default in its reasonable inquiries, “…a civil liability should be imposed by legislation upon these venues to reimburse the victims of crime of this nature”.

Heather MacNeil-Brown “pleaded guilty to five counts of obtaining property by deception” and at sixty three years of age, she faces six years imprisonment with a minimum non-parole period of four years (Drummond, 20 June 2007).