Six KC public works employees plead guilty in overtime fraud scheme
Six Kansas City public works employees accused of generating more than $58,000 in overtime for responding to mostly bogus reports of damaged street signs have each pleaded guilty, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.
Prentis M. Rayford, 37; Eric McKamey, 47; and Edward Lee Ellingburg, 48 pleaded guilty in federal court to participating in a conspiracy to commit wire fraud, according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Missouri.
Co-defendants Paul Myers, 62; Kenneth Gethers, 34; and Julio Prospero, 49, have also pleaded guilty to their roles in the wire fraud conspiracy.
The six, who were employees of the city’s Public Works Sign Division, were part of an overtime fraud conspiracy that ran from January 2013 to November 2016, prosecutors said.
The workers, their friends and relatives called the city to report damaged street signs that were considered essential in order to generate overtime work, prosecutors alleged. The employees submitted time sheets and work orders for signs they either falsely claimed to have repaired or that they repaired during regular shifts.
Prosecutors said four of the defendants, Rayford, McKamey, Ellingburg and Prospero, used a phone app to disguise their numbers when they called the 311 Action Center to report a problem.
A supervisor with the signs division of public works began to suspect in the summer of 2016 that reports of downed signs were unnecessary or false. An internal investigation took place from August until November of that year.
During that time, prosecutors said, about “75 percent of all callouts were found to be fraudulent.”
According to court records, managers would respond to the scene, usually before the employee arrived, and often found the signs were up. Occasionally, a sign was found to be down but wasn’t repaired until the following workday.
Managers also tracked the GPS on work trucks and often found that the trucks did not go to the scene of the reported downed sign. Other times, GPS indicated that the trucks traveled to the location but did not stop or did not stop long enough for the sign to be repaired, court records said.
The city reported the findings to the FBI for further investigation.
The six employees were indicted in federal court last summer. At the time of the indictment, a city spokesman said all six workers were disciplined and only Prospero remained a city employee.
The defendants admitted to submitting work orders that falsely claimed they maintained or installed signs on multiple occasions, prosecutors said Wednesday.
According to the terms of the plea agreements, each defendant must forfeit to the government any proceeds they each obtained from the scheme, prosecutors said.
Sentencing hearings are expected to be scheduled at a later date.
