Over a dozen employees at the Broward Sheriff’s Office (BSO) have been charged with fraudulently obtaining Paycheck Protection Program loans.
The fraud initially came to light in a report published by the Florida Bulldog earlier this week.
At a press conference on Thursday with Broward Sheriff Gregory Tony, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Markenzy Lapointe said that a total of 17 employees, all of whom are “sworn BSO deputies,” were charged with fraud.
“All 17 defendants are charged with participating in various schemes to defraud the United States Small Business Administration by providing false information regarding their eligibility for financial assistance,” Lapointe said.
The employees collectively received around $500,000, which they diverted for their own personal use.
While the 17 defendants did not commit the offenses in the course of their official duties, “this does not in any way diminish the seriousness of what the defendants are alleged to have done here,” Lapointe said. “Law enforcement officers stand in a position of trust to the members of the public who they serve.”
Lapointe added that the fraud didn’t appear to be coordinated and said all 17 employees are being charged separately.
Sheriff’s statement
For his part, the Broward Sheriff said he was disappointed in the officers.
“I hate to see that, knowing some of the individuals and seeing the names on that list as being indicted, some of them were good officers,” Tony said. “But you’re only as good as the last act and conduct that you execute, and so if you’re gonna be participating in criminal activities, we don’t want you in this profession.”
The investigation went back as far as 2021. The sheriff said he had also instructed the office’s corruption unit to investigate all 5,500 BSO employees “to ensure that we would not leave one stone unturned.”
The sheriff said the office has worked too hard to allow “one or two individuals” to destroy the public trust that the office has built within the community.
He also urged BSO employees to continue to report instances of crime and wrongdoing within the organization to protect the BSO’s reputation and values. “If you see something, I expect you to say something … if there’s any other type of corruption or misconduct from any colleague within this place,” he said.
PPP loan fraud
The Paycheck Protection Program is a $953-billion business loan program established by the United States federal government during the Trump administration in 2020 through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act) to help certain businesses, self-employed workers, sole proprietors, certain nonprofit organizations, and tribal businesses continue paying their workers.
Fraudsters, however, took advantage of the program.
A 2021 working paper by three finance professors at the University of Texas at Austin estimated that about 15% of the program’s loans, representing $76 billion (about 1.8 million loans out of the total of about 11.8 million loans), had at least one indication of fraud. About 1.2 million loans (totaling $38 billion) had at least two indications of fraud.
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