0 the taking or illegal use of money by someone who has responsibility for it, such as a company or government official:
I, frankly, can attribute no importance to the defalcations, deplorable as they are, of a cashier and certain irregularities in the accounts.
A fruitful cause of defalcations is that there are too many solicitors.
They have £16 million-worth of assets and, to the best of our knowledge and belief, there have never been any losses or defalcations.
For 60 years their labour is to be mortgaged to make good the admitted defalcations of dishonest politicians.
It is not as though penalties were necessary because of some deliberate defalcation.
They both deal with the scandal of solicitors' defalcations.
The district auditor discovered serious defalcations on the part of the late assistant overseer, and the latter has since been convicted of forgery and embezzlement.
Obviously, there is no relation between the amount of money going through a solicitor's clients' account and the possibility, shall we say, of defalcation.
