Legal Question in Business Law in California

Re: Is a personal lawsuit possible for something fraudulent I did at work?

First, let's not mix up three concepts your question seems to raise: whether you can be sued, whether the plaintiff is likely to win, and whether you have any assets that can be taken to satisfy a judgment. There are some corollary questions, too, such as whether it is likely you will be named in a suit and whether this is a civil or criminal matter, or both.

A personal lawsuit is possible. At this point the crystal ball gets cloudy, because you don't give any hint as to why you did this, who was supposed to benefit, or whether we are talking about a few hundred or a few million dollars.

Civil lawsuits for fraud, cheating and similar torts are generally based on a notion that there is a victim, and the victim is seeking money damages to compensate for harm done him. (There are also, to be sure, do-gooder statutes that impose fines on businesses or their operators for a broad range of unfair practices, and call for monetary civil penalties irrespective of actual damages, but I think this is not likely to come into play here.) If this person discovered the padded bill and never overpaid, there is no basis for civil suit for fraud (a criminal charge for something like "attempted fraud" is not impossible, but again I think not very likely unless LOTS of money was involved).

The next hazy issue is your motive for doing this. It sounds to me as though only the boss, or the company, stood to benefit from your indiscretion. Motive doesn't have much bearing on liability, but it could be a factor in whether you are named as a defendant singly, along with the boss, or not at all.

Turning to the boss, is he the owner of the business that did the overbilling? Was it an LLC already at the time, or did he put the business into the LLC afterwards? If the latter, he hasn't helped himself a bit, but may have made matters worse by adding a fraudulent transfer on top of an attempt to defraud.

Another problem in analyzing your situation based on the facts given is that the relationships of the parties are very unclear....you speak of tenants, an LLC, the company, your boss. Is the company now the LLC? Is the company a property owner/landlord, or is the tenancy unrelated to the business? I would need about three such paragraphs of info to understand the case, not just the one.

However, on the whole, I think you bear little risk of a judgment and loss of your assets, largely because it does not appear that the prospective plaintiff suffered any compensable harm.