COEUR d'ALENE - Approximately $350,000 in rent and security deposit funds from rental homes managed by Absolute Property Management was missing when the business closed last month, the accountant said Friday.

In a wide-ranging interview with The Press, accountant Scott Jaxxon, 40, answered questions about what led to Absolute Property Management's closure and its owner, Carrie Farrell, being accused by property owners of taking their money and disappearing.

"I don't know if it was done purposely, or if it was done carelessly, or if she got in over her head," Jaxxon said of Absolute's failure and the unaccounted-for money. "I tried my best to help her, and it didn't work out."

Not long after being hired in January 2012, Jaxxon said he found that Absolute had an account at Idaho Independent Bank where it was supposed to hold security deposit funds paid by tenants, but it had virtually no money in it.

Once he was working for her, Jaxxon said he tried to commit money to the account but it never stuck.

"The best we could do was come up with the (deposit) money to pay tenants and any others who departed as they were going," Jaxxon said.

He said Absolute also was behind on sending rent money along to property owners.

"That's the way the business was when I walked in," Jaxxon said. "They were trying to come up with money when they should have had it on hand."

Farrell, 45, did have explanations for the lagging rent checks to property owners and missing security deposit money, he said.

He was told by Farrell that she had bought another property management company, doubling the portfolio of properties she managed, but they came without the security deposits.

"And she paid the lady approximately $60,000 when buying the business," he said.

He said he also was told by Farrell that she had two previous accountants steal money from Absolute, one taking $150,000 and the other making off with $75,000. No reports have been made to police by Farrell about those alleged thefts.

To the best of his knowledge, he said Farrell took $40,000 to $50,000 from Absolute's income to support a restaurant she opened in Soap Lake, Wash., called the Sundial Bistro, which later tanked.

"We lost a lot of ground when she opened up the restaurant," Jaxxon said. "A lot of it was checks directly from us to them."

There also were some credit purchases by Sundial that Absolute had to pay off. He said the plan was for Sundial to pay the money back, but it never happened.

Farrell also took approximately $25,000 from Absolute's property management side of its business operations to prop up another side. The other side, a general contracting operation, fixed up homes foreclosed on by Fannie Mae for re-sale. As a general contractor, she hired sub-contractors to get the work done, Jaxxon said.

"When the foreclosure company was slow, Absolute would loan money," he said. The property management business and foreclosure business both operated under the same limited liability company.

There were a lot of transfers between the property management and foreclosure sides, he said. It was difficult to track the money, but he believes between $25,000 and $28,000 was never paid back to the property management side.

Jaxxon also was critical of himself, saying he borrowed in March approximately $12,000 from Farrell and Absolute, with her approval, to help his father's restaurant, which also went belly up.

"I'm not entirely faultless at this, but I was trying to do the best I could for everybody," Jaxxon said.

He was fired by Farrell on May 15.

"I was told they just have to do what they had to do," he said.

She made further efforts to sell Absolute in June. It closed July 12.

Multiple property owners who hired Absolute to manage their homes, duplexes and other properties have filed lawsuits against Farrell and Absolute. Others say they are in the process of doing so.

Absolute was managing approximately 150 properties, for more than 100 property owners, earlier this year.

Farrell and her attorney have not responded to requests for comment from The Press.

Some of the properties managed by Absolute were owned by Farrell herself, along with her family members. Jaxxon said Farrell shared ownership in six or seven properties.

He said mortgage payments on some of her properties were higher than the rent being charged, and the management fee was around 3 percent.

"Some of those properties had negative balances on the books," he said.

Jaxxon said he did everything he could to right the ship at Absolute after he responded to a Craigslist ad for a bookkeeper in December 2011.

He said he wrote multiple business proposals. As an accountant, he accepted a wage of only $13.50 an hour, spending late nights and weekends at the office.

Jaxxon recommended to Farrell that Absolute increase the percentage it charged to manage properties.

"Every month we were losing a little bit of ground," Jaxxon said. "I thought if we could get 10 percent, we should get 10 percent" in management fees.

Some properties were only bringing in 5 percent, and the average was 6.5 percent, he said. He said the business was losing out on about $5,000 to $6,000 per month in management fees "because we cut these deals."

Raising the management fee would help pay off debts, and allow the business to catch up, he said. It would take time, but it was possible, he believed.

Absolute was bringing in about $130,000 per month in total rent money, and earning about $8,000 in management fees. But $8,000 wasn't covering the overhead, he said.

His firing came out of the blue, in that until a week or two before he was fired he was getting ready to take Farrell's place as owner of Absolute.

In February, he and Farrell agreed over lunch at Capone's pub and grill in Coeur d'Alene that she would sell the business to him for the $350,000 in debt. In other words, she could walk away from the massive debt in exchange for giving him the business, which Jaxxon believed he could fix.

She would be free to run her Soap Lake restaurant and her foreclosure business.

For Jaxxon, he thought it would be a great way to get his own business, without having to pay any money.

But the transaction was never completed, and he quickly became jobless. He never got his last paycheck, he said.