Woman Pleads Guilty to Defrauding Section 8 Housing

• Author: Mary Singleton
• Posted: 2024-04-18

Woman Pleads Guilty to Defrauding Section 8 Housing

Section 8 has been around in America for around 100 years, and the Housing Choice Voucher has been handed out for around two generations now. In essence, the idea is that poor people unable to afford housing can find a place of their liking to live, and the government will foot either part of or all of the rent to live there. In theory, Section 8 is supposed to provide temporary relief, and it's supposed to be monitored closely enough that people cannot defraud the system. Even still, every year there are thousands of people who stay on the program due to fraudulent paperwork. Very recently, a woman in Canton, Ohio was found to have defrauded Section 8 for many years. Donna Carney, who is 67 years old, admitted in court on Wednesday, Oct 12, that she had been defrauding Section 8 since 1995. For nearly 30 years, Carney was involved in a scheme that stole money from the government.

According to the court documents from Canton, Carney is facing a possible 10 years in prison. Carney entered her plea to Judge Sarah A. L. Merriam, of the U.S. Circuit Court, but she did not receive any leniency for finally coming clean after all of these years. The reports claim that Carney applied for a Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher and received it in 1995, and she has been getting the government to pay her rent for this voucher for over 25 years. Very recently it was found out, however, that Carney was not a poor person in need of Section 8 and was in fact married to her landlord. What this means is that Carney was funneling government money directly into her husband's pocket from her Section 8 claim.

No news has broken as to whether or not her husband was a willing participant in the scheme. According to some in the media who have spoken about this case, it doesn't make any logical or logistical sense for Carney to be involved in this scheme solo, since the money would be going to her landlord (husband) in recent years, and not delivered to Carney herself. So there's no way that her husband could be an innocent party in this. Though no news is available about Carney's husband to this point.

When she's sentenced on Feb 2, Carney is looking at 10 years in prison and will likely get most of that time. She defrauded the government for over two decades, taking advantage of a program that was intended to help poor people shelter themselves, not for regular people to enrich themselves. The court will likely not be too kind to Carney after that.

Too Many Bad Apples

A really unfortunate fact of reality is that thousands of people defraud Section 8 every year. It's to the point now where many politicians happily vote against extending the program to help more people because they believe it will just facilitate more fraud. This is obviously unfair to individuals who truly do need housing assistance, but the American government isn't exactly that good at keeping fraud out of its programs. Just speaking of recent blunders, about 70% of the trillions of dollars in COVID relief is entirely unaccounted for. The government doesn't know if it was stolen, misplaced, misused or what. It's just missing. They cannot even handle things on a smaller scale. The Postal Service and DMV offices are always train wrecks of the highest magnitude. Some estimates even suggest that upwards of 30% of SNAP benefit funding is obtained through fraud. This leaves a lot of people hungry and homeless because criminals love taking advantage of government spending. It also doesn't help much when a lot of that criminal element seems to reside inside of the government.

Fighting the Wind

Advocates for increased Section 8 funding are really fighting an uphill battle here. A big part of the problem is that these advocates do not want more checks and balances. They do not want more policing of the program. They believe that to do so disproportionately affects racial minorities, and so they claim any such oversight of the program is racism displayed by the government. What they want is the faucet turned on and no safeguards against the sort of fraud that Carney admitted to committing. This is the sort of attitude that also turns many politicians off when it comes time to vote on expanding Section 8's services.

If only someone could do something to minimize the amount of fraud in Section 8, tens of thousands of additional Americans would be able to find housing with the program.