Politics
Ex-Biden State Department Employee Pleads Guilty In Massive Fraud Scheme
A former State Department budget analyst who served under the Biden Administration has pleaded guilty to embezzling more than $650,000 from the agency over a two-year span, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington D.C. announced.
Levita Almuete Ferrer, 64, admitted to abusing her signature authority over a State Department checking account between March 2022 and April 2024. Ferrer, a Maryland resident, worked as a senior budget analyst in the department’s Office of the Chief of Protocol.
Over the two-year period, she wrote 60 checks to herself and an additional three checks to another individual she had a personal relationship with, prosecutors said. Each check was printed and signed before ultimately being deposited in Ferrer’s personal bank account.
In total, the ex-State Department employee racked up $657,347.50 in fraudulent charges.
Ferrer, who also goes by Levita Brezovic, attempted to cover up the scheme through the use of a QucikBooks account. She did so by entering her own name as the payee on checks in Quickbooks before printing them, prosecutors said.
She would often then change the listed payee in Quickbooks from herself to a legitimate State Department vendor, which made it difficult for anyone viewing the fraudulent entries in the Quickbooks system to see Ferrer as the payee on the checks.
Levita Ferrer
Photo: LinkedIn
On Wednesday, Ferrer pleaded guilty to theft of government property and is scheduled to be sentenced on September 18. She faces a maximum of 10 years in federal prison.
As part of her plea agreement, Ferrer agreed to pay the stolen amount in restitution to the U.S. government. She will also be liable for a forfeiture money judgment in that same amount.
The announcement comes just days after acting D.C. U.S. Attorney Ed Martin clawed back nearly $1 million in a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) over-billing case. During an administrative audit of the U.S. Government funded Sri Lanka@100 project, it was discovered that USAID was over-billed more than $850,000 by inflating its employee salary costs.
“During an administrative audit, it was discovered that Stax put hidden profit in its proposed salary for its employees. This hidden profit violated the terms of the cooperative agreement entered into by USAID, and further was in direct contradiction to expressed statements to Stax informing them that they were not to get any profit from this cooperative agreement,” Martin announced in a press release.
