Mathis Court Rules on Sufficiency of Fraud Charges Based on Bondsman's Duty to Report

The court of appeals in State v. Mathis, ___ N.C. App. ___ (2018), decided yesterday, considered whether a licensed bail bondsman could be convicted of obtaining property by false pretenses and unlawfully accessing a government computer for submitting false monthly reports to the NC Department of Insurance that omitted some of the outstanding bonds he had issued. The court upheld one conviction but found the evidence insufficient to support the other. Hazard a guess as to which conviction met which fate. Then read on to see how the court ruled and why. Facts. Mathis was first licensed as a bail bondsman in February 1998 and his license was renewed each year thereafter up to the time of his trial in 2017. To retain his license, Mathis was required to submit monthly reports to the North Carolina Department of Insurance (DOI) listing the outstanding bonds he had issued. Mathis submitted reports from 2009 to 2014 that failed to list several of the bonds he had outstanding. This omission inured to Mathis’s benefit in two ways. First, it allowed Mathis to write bonds that, in the aggregate, exceeded the sum of eight times the amount he maintained on deposit in his security account. Writing bonds in excess of this amount violated DOI rules. Second, it allowed Mathis to write individual bonds that exceeded one quarter of the amount he had on deposit, again a violation of DOI rules. For many of the bonds issued in violation of DOI rules, Mathis received a percentage [...]