A former executive at the Atlanta Housing Authority was sentenced this week for committing Section 8 and COVID-19 pandemic insurance fraud.
On Wednesday, Tracy Jones, 61, was sentenced to nine months in prison and nine months of house arrest followed by 15 months of supervised release on charges of conspiracy to commit theft of government funds, wire fraud, and credit application fraud, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Georgia said in a release Friday.
In addition, Jones will have to pay $65,598.80 in restitution and a fine of $63,546.
Jones was a senior vice president at the agency between April 2017 and her guilty plea in February, overseeing a housing voucher program that is one of the nation’s largest and which is paid for by federal Section 8 funding provided by the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Housing authority personnel are generally forbidden from being landlords who receive Section 8 payments, and Section 8 landlords are generally prohibited from leasing to their own family.
Using her position, Jones used a fake name and a shell company to create fake forms to get her family members admitted to the Section 8 program to live in a house she rented out, which in turn let her receive the Section 8 payments, the U.S. attorney’s office said. She received over $36,000 through the scheme.
“I think it’s devastating. When I saw the story, I was blown away by the level of deceit and arrogance. You’re not only giving a voucher to a family member—the family member is renting your house. That’s double-dipping,” a former Atlanta Housing Authority employee, who did not provide their name, told WSB-TV.
Jones simultaneously used the shell company from the first scheme and another company to fraudulently rake in over $27,000 in COVID-19 pandemic relief funds from the U.S. Small Business Administration, the U.S. attorney’s office said.
Jones lied and said that her businesses were functioning, had multiple personnel working there and that they brought in over $56,000 in gross revenue in 2019.
When one of her applications got rejected, she said in an appeal that she was an “honest business owner” and that while she had heard of other people using pandemic money to “to establish a lavish lif[e] style,” that sort of thing was “not me,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.
In addition, Jones also committed mortgage fraud on her Section 8 rental property, federal prosecutors said, by claiming on an application for a loan worth over $219,000 that the house was her main residence, that it was not being rented out and that she did not own any other properties.
