Fraud Friday – Bureau of Indian Affair’s Employee Funnels $1.2 million of Loans to … BIA Employees and Relatives

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July 12, 2013

bureau of indian affairsBy 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.”

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