Secret Service investigating misappropriation of pandemic assistance funds
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A former employee of a social services agency in Merrillville is accused of misappropriating more than $600,000 in pandemic-relief funds meant for rental assistance.
The employee at Geminus was fired, and evidence was turned over to the U.S. Secret Service after internal discrepancies were discovered and an audit performed, Regional Care Group and Geminus President and CEO Bill Trowbridge told our partners at The Times of Northwest Indiana.
The audit by Indianapolis-based accounting firm Blue & Co. found that the employee misappropriated $636,000 by creating fictitious landlords to fraudulently request rental payments, Trowbridge said.
“An employee that created fictitious landlords circumvented internal controls to request rental payments from the Emergency Rental Assistance program for tenants that had already paid their rent,” the accounting firm said in its audit. “Additional finance personnel have been hired to improve internal controls surrounding the grant expenditure process. In addition, management has reported any suspicious payment activity made to landlords to the authorities and has suspended any future payments to those landlords.”
Merrillville-based Geminus, which provides services such as Head Start, abuse prevention and domestic violence intervention, managed $40 million in emergency rental assistance for Lake County during the COVID-19 pandemic, Trowbridge told the publication.
Geminus suspected fraudulent transactions took place based on what it found in its normal internal audit procedures in July 2022, Trowbridge said. The agency turned its records over to the U.S. Secret Service, the Treasury Department’s investigative arm.
No one who was supposed to get emergency rental relief did not as a result of the misappropriation, Trowbridge said.