Fraud Friday – Bureau of Indian Affair’s Employee Funnels $1.2 million of Loans to … BIA Employees and Relatives
July 12, 2013
By Bob Coleman
Editor, Coleman Report
An appellate-court panel Friday upheld a bribery conviction for the former Fort Peck superintendent for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, but reversed four other convictions involving her role in a loan fraud scheme.
Florence White Eagle, the former superintendent of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in northeastern Montana, had been charged in relation to a government-loan scam allegedly run since the early 1990s by the late Toni Greybull, a BIA administrator who died in 2008, and others.
Through the scam, employees tasked with administering a government credit program on the reservation “obtained loans by filing applications in the names of ‘nominee,’ or stand-in, relatives and then splitting the proceeds amongst themselves,” according to the ruling published Friday.
An audit of the program found that some $1.2 million of the approximately $1.6 million that the credit program loaned “went to credit program employees and their stand-in family members.”