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PW assesses fraud damage
Prince William officials are still assessing the damage from the fraud scheme in which employees in the county's Office of Information Technology set up shell companies to steal millions. So far, four men have been charged with 153 counts of falsifying bids and contracts.Officials have estimated the county's loss in the millions and have had to scrap several technology systems the contractors had been working on.
"We are going to try to get back as much as we possibly can,” Deputy County Executive Melissa Peacor said on Tuesday.
In early June, then-County Executive Craig Gerhart and police officials announced that staffers in the county's Office of Information Technology and their accomplices had set up shell companies to submit false bids for contract work through the county.
Using the fake companies, they inflated the bids while ensuring that one of their companies would usually be awarded the contract. In some cases, they did some of the work but in other cases, they simply kept the money and did no work.
On Tuesday, Peacor said one of the six most seriously-affected systems was an information upgrade for the Sheriff's Office and another was an upgrade to the county's real estate assessment system.
In all of the cases, the fake companies had been contracted to create new information systems and upgrades. The old systems remained running while the bogus contractors worked with the new systems. Operations were never compromised because the scam was discovered before the fake contractors' systems were completed and installed, Peacor said. Those new systems have since been abandoned and the old systems are still being used.
Shortly after the arrest, investigators said that more than $8 million was funneled through the group and county officials estimated that some work was done for about half of the projects, although it was not necessarily what was expected.
Officials believe the scheme had been going on for about five years and was only uncovered in February after a county employee alerted supervisors. The matter was referred to Gerhart, who ordered an audit of the Office of Information Technology.
As a result, several employees were placed on administrative leave and three: John Lim, Davis Ampofo and Maneesh Gupta, were later fired.
Gupta has been charged with racketeering, money laundering and multiple counts of bid rigging, conspiracy to commit forgery, uttering and obtaining money by false pretenses.
Lim and Ampofo were not charged; however, two former county employees were. John Patrick Roessler and Richard Todd Billingsley both face charges similar to Gupta's. The two had been working for the county but were no longer employees by the time the investigation began.
John Roessler's brother, Vernon Andrew Roessler, faces similar charges as well, though he was not a county employee.
The head of the department, Masood Noorbakhsh, resigned after the arrests. He was not implicated in the scheme but insiders said he was forced to resign because he had not been aware of what was going on in his department and had abdicated his responsibility for authorizing contracts.
Peacor said on Tuesday that officials have since put in controls to help ensure that such schemes don't happen again. For instance, she said, Gupta had been responsible for all aspects of awarding contracts. Now, she said, contracts will have to go through several layers before they are awarded and individual project managers will be more involved.
"Can we ensure that no one ever steals? No,” she said, “But we can put controls in place to make it very difficult.”
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