The fraud continues from within
Via DC Crime Stories
A former District of Columbia Department of Human Services employee has pleaded guilty to conspiring to steal $800,000 in Medicaid, food stamps and other benefits meant for the city’s poorest residents.
Forty-five-year-old Aretha Holland-Jackson, of Bowie, pleaded Friday to a charge of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. She is facing a likely sentence of between nearly 3 and 3 1/2 years in prison, prosecutors said. Her sister, Allison Holland, 47, of Cheltenham, also pleaded to the conspiracy, and faces more than a year to nearly three years in prison.Department of Human Services
Nearly half of the stolen money was supposed to go to the D.C.’s hungriest people. The District of the Columbia has the second-highest rate of families who were hungry over the course of year because they could not afford food, according to D.C. Hunger Solutions.
“As a District of Columbia employee, Aretha Holland-Jackson was supposed to provide benefits to needy families,” said said U.S. Attorney Ronald Machen Jr., “but instead she used her position of trust to steal more than $800,000 of those benefits to finance her own lifestyle.”
HT BB