Ex-Roane County EMS worker accused of embezzling through excess wages

ROANE COUNTY, WV (WOWK) – A woman in Roane County is facing charges for allegedly clocking around $30,000 of excess wages as a Roane County EMS employee.

According to a criminal complaint from Roane County Magistrate Court, Erica Bryan of Spencer is charged with embezzlement and computer fraud in connection to the investigation. The complaint says West Virginia State Police began investigating Bryan in late 2023 while she was employed by Roane County EMS.

The complaint says Bryan held several working positions simultaneously including a Roane County EMS driver, a Roane County EMS office manager, a Roane County 911 dispatcher, a Roane General Hospital ambulance driver and a Roane County Board of Education substitute teacher. She was terminated from her EMS and 911 positions in December 2023 due to suspected embezzlement, according to the complaint.

As a Roane County EMS office manager, part of Bryan’s duties were to input pay and hours into the payroll system through the office manager’s computer, and according to the complaint, she admitted in an interview with authorities she was the only person who input hours into the payroll system.

According to West Virginia State Police, the investigation began after she had allegedly been billing for “an extraordinary amount of workhour for a part-time employment as the Roane EMS office manager.” The complaint states the investigating officer found Bryan allegedly billed 100 hours during a two-week pay period – 80 hours plus 20 hours of overtime – for multiple months in 2023. The complaint says she was also employed in her other positions during these months.

The complaint says investigators spoke with her predecessor who said Bryan’s duties should not have taken more than 20 hours per week. The EMS director also confirmed that the person who replaced Bryan completed the same amount of work in about 13 hours per week, according to the complaint.

According to the complaint, there were also pay raises given to Bryan that were “inconsistent with legitimate pay raises.”

Troopers say that in an interview, Bryan “remained adamant” that she worked all recorded hours she had claimed while also holding her other employments. However, the complaint says investigators found that there were multiple instances in almost every month of her employment during 2023 in which she was “clocked in to her position as a Roane EMS driver and was completing office manager duties on the office manager computer simultaneously,” meaning she was completing her office manager duties while billing for her time as an EMS driver.

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