The long arms of the USDA Risk Management Agency (RMA) recently caught a Nebraska man for making false statements in the collection of a sizeable crop insurance claim. The end result was a sentence of 16 weekends of jail time, a $100 special assessment, a $30,000 fine and the kicker of $1,000,000 in restitution. The sentence was for a 2015 crop insurance claim with the investigation starting after the man [...]
The U.S. Attorney for Minnesota recently indicted a contractor for defrauding the Paycheck Protection Program ("PPP"). Given the broad uses of PPP loans, this contractor went pretty far out of bounds to get himself indicted. The U.S. Attorney’s press release explained the underlying allegations. Strike One: The contractor applied for a PPP loan well after his construction company had stopped operation. Strike Two: The contractor submitted false employee and expense [...]
Have you ever considered whether you could be held personally liable for signing company documents? Maybe you should, especially if you know the documents are false. A recent case out of Ohio, Decker v. Wesex, is considering whether the CFO of a construction company can be held personally liable for falsifying affidavits that stated that the construction company was paying its subcontractors. In this case, Wesex was hired to build [...]
SO SAYS THE 8TH CIRCUIT. A new ruling from the 8th Circuit affirms what we all know to be true: people who exaggerate their insurance claim losses should never be rewarded. But why is this new case interesting to us, Dear Readers? Because the 8th Circuit refused to sever the claims that were untruthful from those that were truthful and rejected them all. Final score? Insurance Carrier: 1 [...]
