A federal employee pleaded guilty Thursday to fraud, admitting she used teleworking so she could claim to be working full-time for three different government agencies at the same time.
Crissy Monique Baker worked at Housing and Urban Development, where she was a full-time management and program analyst. But she also held contractor positions to do human resources work at AmeriCorps and the National Institutes of Health.
Prosecutors said she not only didn’t get approval from HUD for the other work, but sometimes billed the government for more than 24 hours of work in a single day.
In her plea agreement, she admitted to costing taxpayers $225,866.99 in payments for time she didn’t actually work.
“She was able to successfully conceal her employment because she teleworked in all three positions,” prosecutors and Ms. Baker said in the plea deal.
Baker began working as a human resources contractor for AmeriCorps on Sept. 1, 2021, then started as a full-time analyst at HUD on Oct. 25 of that year. She was a GS-13 position.
On May 16, 2022, she also started working as a contractor for NIH, meaning she was listed as working all three jobs until the NIH job ended on Dec. 2, 2022. She continued contracting for AmeriCorps through April 30, 2023.
During June 2022, when she was triple-dipping, she reported 13 different days where she worked 26 hours — 10 hours at HUD and eight hours apiece for the NIH and AmeriCorps contracts.
She also reported five other days where she worked between 15 and 18 hours across a combination of the jobs.
There was also one 10-hour day and another 4-hour day that month.
AmeriCorps paid the contracting company for 141 hours that month, at a rate of $70.87 an hour, while NIH paid another contracting company for 149 hours, at a rate of $108 an hour, for that month.
Baker admitted she also inflated the hours she was working for HUD.
The Washington Times has reached out to Baker’s lawyer and to HUD for comment.
Baker’s telework jobs coincided with the pandemic, when agency buildings emptied out and federal employees adopted remote working as a standard.
President Biden made some efforts to get employees back in the office, while President Trump has ordered agencies to get employees back to in-person work.
The tradeoff, according to the Government Accountability Office, is that fewer people want to work those federal jobs where telework is not an option.
The court documents don’t reveal the names of the contracting companies, and they don’t say how Baker’s scam was spotted. The U.S. attorney’s office said the investigation included inspectors general at AmeriCorps, HUD, the Energy Department, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Homeland Security, the General Services Administration, Health and Human Services, the IRS and the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, along with the FBI and the Defense Department’s Criminal Investigative Service.
Baker, 45, a resident of Fairfax, is scheduled to be sentenced on Sept. 30.
