Scenes from outside america Office of Personnel Management in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday May 21, 2019.
Sarah Silbiger | The Washington Post | Getty Images
A former worker of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management pleaded guilty in Washington, D.C., federal court on Friday to steering greater than $10 million price of OPM contracts to firms associated together with her or her husband over the course of 12 years, authorities said.
The previous OPM employee, 54-year-old Sheron Spann, is resulting from be sentenced Sept. 21.
Spann pleaded guilty to at least one felony count of taking actions affecting a private financial interest. The utmost sentence for the charge is five years, however the beneficial sentence is zero to 6 months.
Spann admitted at her plea hearing Friday that as early as 2011 she began steering OPM “information technology contracts to firms under control of Spann and her husband without disclosing the character or extent of her relationship to the businesses,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia said in a press release.
Spann, who began working at OPM’s contracting office in 2007, is married to Thomas Spann III. Her husband is the co-founder of an organization named Enlightened Inc. He had also worked for one more company called LogApps, court records show.
When Enlightened was incorporated in Maryland and Washington in 1997, Sheron Spann signed documents as a witness for its articles of incorporation, documents show.
A court filing says that in August 2011, Sheron Spann used her government email address to propose to an OPM contracting office representative that OPM invite Enlightened to bid on a contract for developing software used to administer background investigations for federal employees and contractors.
Enlightened won that contract, which had a funding ceiling of $4.5 million, with Sheron Spann serving as OPM’s point of contact on the deal, the court filing said.
Work under that contract ended up surpassing the unique funding ceiling, “to exceed $25 million,” in line with the filing.
Enlightened won a $1.5 million contract from OPM in April 2017 without having to compete with other bidders, the filing said.
Five months after that, OPM awarded Enlightened one other contract that ended up earning the corporate greater than $7.35 million, in line with the filing.
“At the identical time that S. Spann was overseeing OPM’s contracts with Enlightened, S. Spann was deriving a private financial profit from Enlightened through an intermediary company Enlightened utilized as one in all its contractors, Tier 1 LLC,” the filing said.
Financial records showed that Enlightened paid Tier 1 LLC nearly $736,000 from March 2012 through April 2017.
Documents also show that funds from Enlightened to Tier 1 made “payments for accounts that advantages each S. Spann and T. Spann, including an American Express account, and vehicle payments” to a few lenders.
Sheron Spann’s lawyer didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
CNBC has also reached out to Enlightened for comment.
