A mother and daughter who ran a company designed to help find jobs for the blind embezzled more than $280,000, much of which was meant to fund the blind workers’ retirements, prosecutors said in court documents.
Barbara Stevenson-Jones, 70, and her daughter, Pamela R. Stevenson, 51, have admitted to embezzling the cash through the company Wellness, a D.C. contractor given hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to recruit, train and support blind people who had obtained food vending licenses. The two are scheduled to be sentenced Monday and face up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
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Wellness was funded by the District with cash from the U.S. Department of Education. The District’s Department of Human services was supposed to supervise the funds.
In 2004, the mother and daughter canceled their year-old contract when District officials began to raise questions about nonperformance issues on the contract, court documents said.
Throughout the contract, Wellness was required to create escrow accounts to help fund the retirement plans for the blind vendors the company employed, prosecutors said. But those accounts were never created, and the cash Wellness received on the contract was with withdrawn from business accounts and deposited into personal accounts before the contract was killed.
The scheme, prosecutors wrote in court documents, “prevented some of the blind vendors from retiring as otherwise planned.”
Many of the vendors also did not receive commissions that Wellness was required to pay them. As a result, “many of the blind vendors suffered personal hardship as they were short-changed or failed to receive monies that represented their livelihood,” prosecutors wrote. A few of the 46 blind vendors employed by the company “required medical care related to the stress of not receiving their money from Wellness.”
The mother-daughter plot could also have caused the District to lose its federal funding for the program, potentially causing the blind vendors employed by a subsequent contractor to lose their jobs, court documents said.
“This scenario would have created significant financial hardship on the blind vendors,” prosecutors wrote. Ultimately, the District moved the blind vendors program in-house, where it’s now managed.
