Jessica Anne Miller, Wire Fraud, North Carolina 2023

Charlotte, NC – Career Coach Sentenced to 24 Months in Prison for Stealing $68,000

A career coach from Hickory, North Carolina, has been sentenced to 24 months in prison for stealing over $68,000 from a federally funded workforce development program. Jessica Anne Miller, 39, was sentenced on March 15, 2023 in the Western District of North Carolina.

Miller was employed as a career coach by an entity contracted by a nonprofit association of local governments to provide training to job seekers, using federal funds made available by the U.S. Department of Labor under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA). WIOA was signed into law in 2014, and it is designed to provide qualified individuals with access to training, education, and support services, and assistance with obtaining employment.

As a career coach, Miller was responsible for providing career guidance, case management and follow up to participants in the youth program. However, court documents show that Miller engaged in a scheme to divert government funds for her own benefit, by creating fraudulent documents, falsifying signatures, and making false and misleading statements to qualified individuals who were supposed to be the recipients of the WIOA funds.

In some instances, Miller created fraudulent documents for mileage reimbursement on behalf of students enrolled in the program, and then cashed the checks and kept the proceeds for herself. In other instances, Miller created fraudulent documents that falsely indicated that qualified individuals had made reimbursable purchases, such as tools of the trade, and were seeking reimbursement for those costs.

Miller also created and submitted fraudulent documents, that included students’ forged signatures, indicating that students had successfully completed certain milestones that would have entitled them to gift cards. Instead of providing those gift cards to qualifying students, Miller kept them for herself.

U.S. Attorney Dena J. King commended the DOL-OIG for their investigation of the case and thanked the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation and the Conover Police Department for their invaluable assistance. Miller will serve two years of supervised release after her prison sentence.

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