A U.S. Forest Service employee in Eastern Oregon quietly gave her boyfriend more than $642,000 from federal firefighting accounts over six years, putting the money into a bank account they shared, according to an indictment unsealed Wednesday.

From there, the money paid not for firefighting, but for gambling, car and mortgage payments, farm expenses and eating out, the federal grand jury indictment said.

Debra Kay Durfey drew the money from a vast national pool of fire funds, where no one missed it among the nearly $1 billion spent nationwide on firefighting each year, court documents and prosecutors said.

Durfey, 49, a purchasing agent in Pendleton, was responsible for overseeing the spending on a local level and had concealed the missing money since 2000 by manipulating government records, the indictment said.

A tip prompted the investigation, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Ryan Archer. There is not enough evidence to charge Durfey's live-in boyfriend, Donald Francis Hollinger, in the case, prosecutors said.

Durfey, who lives in the small town of Echo, was arrested Tuesday and arraigned Wednesday in Portland on five counts of embezzlement and theft of public money. She faces up to 10 years in prison on each count

U.S. Magistrate Donald C. Ashmanskas released Durfey pending a trial on the condition that she not gamble and seek treatment for gambling problems. He questioned whether he should appoint a federally paid public defender, saying Durfey may be able to afford her own attorney.

Regional Forest Service spokesman Tom Knappenberger said he could not discuss the case and could not say whether the agency is taking any steps to tighten its oversight of fire spending.

He also would not say whether Durfey has been suspended or fired from her job.

The federal government has come under criticism for wasteful fire spending and poor tracking of money. An internal review in 2003 said firefighting forces sometimes "totally ignored" spending rules and operated as if they had a blank check.

Durfey has worked for the government since 1986 and served as a purchasing agent since 2000, court documents said. She is coordinator of a federal charge card program for the Umatilla, Malheur and Wallowa-Whitman national forests in Eastern Oregon.

In that position, Durfey has her own charge card account and is authorized to write government checks to small businesses that cannot accept federal charge cards.

Since October 2000, Durfey wrote about 180 government checks worth more than $642,000 to Hollinger, court documents and attorneys said.

By using spending codes for specific wildfires burning at the time, she drew the checks from federal fire suppression accounts. The checks were issued to Hollinger as if the Forest Service was paying him for helping to fight the fires, documents said.

Durfey signed each check, and most were deposited into a joint Wells Fargo bank account Durfey and Hollinger had shared since February 2002, the indictment said. It is the same account in which her government paychecks are deposited.

While the checks were charged against certain fires, Hollinger never actually assisted on those fires, documents said.

Instead, the money went toward gambling and personal expenses, the indictment said.

The scheme escalated, with Durfey stealing more and more taxpayer money each year, the indictment said. She wrote checks for $31,461 in 2002 and increased to about $226,200 this year, the indictment said.

Because Durfey had unusual access to the federal charge card system, she was able to conceal the checks written to Hollinger by removing them from quarterly reports and manipulating the system, the indictment said.

Michael Milstein: 503-294-7689; michaelmilstein@news.oregonian.com

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