Pamela Haas, an employee of Trail Leasing, Inc., had access to her employers blank checks. Over a
Question:
Pamela Haas, an employee of Trail Leasing, Inc., had access to her employer’s blank checks. Over a period of about two and a half years, Haas used the firm’s checks to fraudulently obtain cash from the firm’s bank, Drovers First American Bank. She carried out her scheme by writing checks payable to Drovers First, having the checks signed by an authorized officer of Trail Leasing, and then taking the checks to the bank. There she would fill out a “change order form”—a form used by bank customers to specify the coins and bill denominations in which they wished to take cash for business operations—and pocket the cash that she received. By the time the scheme was discovered (through a discrepancy in one of the change orders), Haas had negotiated fifty-five checks for a total of nearly $40,000. Trail Leasing sued the bank to recover the funds paid to Haas without its authorization, and the issue turned on whether the bank was a holder in due course of the checks delivered to it by Haas. Specifically, the issue was whether the bank had taken the checks for value. Trail Leasing argued that because the bank essentially paid Haas from Trail Leasing’s funds (by debiting Trail Leasing’s bank account), the bank had not given value for the instruments and therefore could not be an HDC. Will the court concur in this argument? Discuss. [Trail Leasing, Inc. v. Drovers First American Bank, 447 N.W.2d 190 (Minn. 1989)]
Statistics for the Life Sciences
ISBN: 978-0321989581
5th edition
Authors: Myra Samuels, Jeffrey Witmer, Andrew Schaffner