A former University of Wisconsin-Madison Athletics employee must pay the department more than $7,000 he spent on personal purchases using student athlete per diem cards, a Dane County judge ordered on Monday.
Marcel Dubois pleaded guilty but deferred prosecution for two felony counts of identity theft for personal gain on Sept. 17 in Dane County Court. Dubois, a former athletics procurement specialist, allegedly mishandled 12 student cards during his tenure and spent upwards of $7,000.
The incident was discovered after a former women’s hockey team player noticed there were unfamiliar transactions on her card, according to WMTV 15 News. The transactions matched Dubois’s vacation patterns, UWPD discovered.
A per diem card is a debit-style card given to student athletes to utilize, usually for meals, while traveling for their respective sport. Once given, the cards are no longer university property, meaning that athletes are free to use the money as they wish — essentially functioning as reloadable debit cards. They expire five years after being issued.
Dubois’s job as a procurement specialist involved forwarding letters with new per diem cards to student-athlete recipients. To do this job, he was given access to the athletes’ birthdays to create PINs for the cards.
“UW Athletics was deeply troubled to learn of these allegations. We worked closely with law enforcement officials as part of the investigation and also have conducted a review of our internal processes. The affected student-athletes have been made financially whole and the individual in question is no longer an employee of UW Athletics,” UW Athletics said in a statement.
Dubois will remain on bail.
UWPD did not respond to a request for comment.
