Former Gilbert Plains CAO forged doc’s note to get out of court: RCMP

A former rural municipal official awaiting sentencing for stealing more than $500,000 from community coffers has been accused of forging a fake doctor’s note to get out of attending court.

Amber Fisher, the former chief administrative officer for the Rural Municipality of Gilbert Plains, pleaded guilty to one count of theft over $5,000 last year.

Dauphin RCMP say investigators learned Fisher, 42, had submitted the note indicating she would be unable to attend court for her Sept. 2 sentencing, after she was seriously injured in a vehicle collision on July 22.

Fisher’s lawyer submitted the note to the court and the judge adjourned her sentencing to a later date.

A court official followed up with the RCMP about the doctor’s note and Mounties determined it had been forged. RCMP said no police report about Fisher being in a collision on that date had been filed in any province.

Fisher, who lives in Grandview, was arrested Tuesday and charged with obstruction of justice, forgery and uttering a forged document. She was held in custody.

At a provincial court hearing on Aug. 24, her lawyer, Brett Gladstone, said that a pre-sentence report on Fisher had not been completed. He asked the judge to reorder the report.

He told court he had spoken to the probation officer who had been trying to prepare the report and discovered Fisher had been in a collision and had “severe injuries” around the same time the probation officer had tried to contact her.

Crown prosecutor Samir Hassan noted Fisher’s appointment with the probation officer was scheduled about a week before the supposed incident. He told the judge he had confirmed the clinic, at which Fisher claimed to be getting treatment, was real, but he had not spoken to the doctor there.

Fisher was fired in November 2022 after a report by accounting firm MNP found she had transferred approximately $532,000 from the municipality to her bank account in 2020 and 2021.

In July 2021, council members were alerted by the municipality’s credit union that “substantial transactions” involving the transfer of money from its account into Fisher’s account had been detected, says the agreed statement of facts filed with the court when she pleaded guilty in August 2025.

The credit union froze Fisher’s access to municipality bank accounts and she was suspended from work pending an investigation.

A week later, Fisher emailed a letter to two councillors “in which the accused provided a false explanation in (an) effort to explain away the concerns raised by (the credit union),” says the agreed statement of facts.

“After meeting with my bank today, it has come to light that there have been deposits going into an account in my name without my knowledge,” she wrote. “When I heard this, I dropped and became physically sick. I can’t even begin to explain how I feel right now.”

In later messages, Fisher claimed a cyberattack made it look like she was a thief and that a fraud investigation had been launched that would clear her name, but those were lies, the agreed facts stated.

Fisher was allowed to return to work a few days later after assuring council members the missing money had been recovered and was being held in trust by the credit union, pending the completion of the non-existent fraud investigation.

In the months that followed, Fisher provided councillors with false fraud investigation reports and, in May 2024, pretended to be the writer of one of the reports during a council meeting held over Zoom.

The investigation by MNP found the fraud reports had been created on Fisher’s work computer.

In an interview with MNP auditors in September 2022, Fisher admitted she had spent the money deposited into her account and that she fabricated the story of the cyberattack, as well as the fraud reports.

As of August last year, Fisher had repaid the municipality about $17,000. The RM filed a lawsuit against her in 2023. In the fall of 2024, a judge ordered a default judgment against her in the amount of nearly $550,000 after she failed to defend herself against the lawsuit.

erik.pindera@freepress.mb.ca