It’s now two arrests in two months for a since-fired city HR manager who allegedly used city funds to buy fancy tech gear, as he was arrested again Thursday for charges of stealing $627,000 from the city through a fraudulent workers' compensation scheme.
Imagine the Mohammend Nuru scandal, except way dorkier: Back in August, a fairly low-level SF City Hall grant director and a former city employee were arrested and charged with running a $200,000 contracts-for-kickbacks scheme. Then in late January, city Human Resources manager Stanley John Ellicott was arrested for his tangential involvement in the alleged operation, where he did website work for the former city employee’s new consulting firm, and the grant director paid him off the books with funds earmarked as “earthquake supplies.” Ellicott then allegedly bought VR headsets and high-end tech gear with the money, much of which he sold on eBay and pocketed the money.
Ellicott’s alleged ill-gotten taxpayer slush fund amounted to about $14,000 in that case. But now it looks like he may have been running an exponentially larger con with your tax dollars.
Mission Local reports Ellicott was arrested again Thursday over an alleged $627,000 workers' compensation scam. He’s accused of setting up a fake company, and then billing the city for "auditing services" that this fake company was supposedly performing, to the tune of more than 600 grand.
This allegation is unrelated to the previously described offenses, but was uncovered in the investigation of those offenses. An investigator in the SF district attorney’s office found a “long series of unusual deposits” into Ellicott’s bank account, payments from something called IAG Services.
“Ellicott enlisted a friend to register a fake business in Illinois called ‘IAG Services’ and open a bank account for the business, which she gave full control of to Ellicott,” according to a Thursday press release from DA Brooke Jenkins’s office. “Ellicott then added this fake business as a vendor in the workers’ compensation system and over time billed more than 600 actual City workers’ compensation claims with charges for auditing services. Department archives show no evidence any auditing services were ever performed.”
The release adds that “because the City is self-insured for workers’ compensation purposes, payments to doctors, employees, and vendors related to workers’ compensation claims come directly from the City’s coffers.”
Jenkins’s office says they will charge Ellicott with 62 felony counts, including grand theft, misappropriation of public funds, insurance fraud, and money laundering. He’s scheduled to be arraigned Friday.
Image: Hammer & Tusk via Unsplash
