Arkansas HVACR NewsMagazine March 2025

HVACR NewsMagazine March 2025

State National Chapter News

Inside AAF, Trammell was “very possessive of her office,” and wouldn’t let people go in it nor accept help filing paperwork, Kelly Brown said. The door to her office remained locked. “She just had control of it, and it appeared that she would create distractions so that she could not be discovered,” Brown said. Darren Brown began wondering why the company’s margins weren’t higher. Discovery Kelly Brown worked at Little Rock’s One Bank & Trust and was an authorized signature on Arkansas Air Flow’s account. On Friday, Feb. 2, 2018, Brown learned that an overdraft had occurred on the company’s account. Overdrafts had happened several times, in fact. “I had just about had it,” said Brown, who had been in banking since 1987. She felt the overdraft reflected poorly on her as the bank’s commercial loan officer and senior vice president. Brown called her husband’s company and was told that Trammell was out sick.

Trammell, costing Arkansas Air Flow more than $1.8 million. (Karen E. Segrave) Brown took a friend with a forensic accounting background and headed to AAF. “We were able to get into the computer,” she said. “My friend looked at the function in QuickBooks that was the audit function, and … you could see where [Trammell] had deleted transactions or changed the name of the vendor when the money was going to her.” Brown and her friend worked over the weekend to start piecing together what had happened. “Her little wall started crumbling,” Brown said. “We were able to dissect what charges were truly Arkansas Air Flow-related, and what charges were not.” Darren Brown confronted Trammell on the following Monday with the initial theft findings and fired her. Trammell didn’t deny the embezzlement, but said she would pay the money back, Kelly Brown said. Recovery Brown then used her three weeks’ vacation from the bank to untangle what Trammell did and did not do. The purchases Trammell made with company funds were staggering. The list included several family beach vacations, a Triton bass boat, the rental of a houseboat and the purchase of a $2,500 softball bat from New York, Brown said. Trammell also gave herself unauthorized raises and bonuses throughout the years with the amounts ranging from $100 to $5,000. The damage that Trammell left took “an inordinate amount of time” to repair. For

The binders of evidence used to prosecute Amy Trammell, who is now serving three years in a federal prison, listed more than 1,100 fraudulent transactions by Amy