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Obama DoD OIG Official Sentenced to 7.5 Years in Prison
For Accepting Bribes and Defrauding US Government


By Cristina Laila
Published January 17, 2022 at 3:00pm







Another one…

A former Obama official of the Department of Defense’s Office of Inspector General
on Friday was sentenced to 7.5 years in prison for accepting bribes and defrauding
the US government.

According to charging documents, Matthew LumHo, 47, began soliciting and accepting
bribes from co-conspirator William S. Wilson in 2012.

LumHo oversaw a federal contract designed to allow federal agencies to order
telecommunications services and equipment from two approved national telecommunications
companies, the DOJ said in a press release.

LumHo began funneling orders through his co-conspirator Wilson’s intermediary
telecommunications company.

Wilson received all the business without any competition and disguised the bribes my
making them as payroll payments to one of LumHo’s relatives – to a bank account
controlled by LumHo – for a job that didn’t even exist.

LumHo’s co-conspirator William Wilson will be sentenced on February 4, 2022.


The DOJ’s press release:



ALEXANDRIA, Va.

A former official of the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of
Inspector General (DoD OIG) was sentenced today to 7.5 years in
prison for accepting bribes and defrauding the government, among
other crimes, in relation to a contract he oversaw at the DoD OIG.

According to court documents, Matthew K. LumHo, 47, of Fairfax Station,
was employed at the DoD OIG’s Information Services Directorate.
In that position, LumHo oversaw and administered a prime federal
contract designed to allow federal agencies in the National Capital Region
to order routine telecommunications services and equipment from one
of two national telecommunications companies.

Beginning no later than 2012, LumHo solicited and accepted bribes from
co-conspirator William S. Wilson, in exchange for steering what nominally
was intended to be telecommunications or information technology services
through the prime government contract, through an intermediary
telecommunications company, to Wilson’s company. Wilson’s company received
all of this business without any competition, despite its lack of any relevant
experience or expertise, and despite having no employees based in or near
northern Virginia, where all the work was to be performed. Wilson and LumHo
disguised the bribes by falsely masking them as payroll payments to a relative
of LumHo for a job that did not in fact exist, with the bribes being deposited
into an account that LumHo in fact controlled.

As the scheme progressed, LumHo, who was supposed to be safeguarding the
contract, knowingly authorized numerous false and fraudulent service orders
through the prime contract. The false service orders typically described the items
supposedly being provided to the government as specialized IT-related support
services, when in fact the co-conspirators were simply buying standard,
commercially available items, dramatically marking up the price, and billing
the government as though it had been provided with the specialized IT-related
services. LumHo and Wilson also used fraudulent service orders to conceal bribes
in the form of high-end camera equipment and stereo equipment sent from Wilson
to LumHo, thereby defrauding the government into to paying for the very bribes
themselves.


In a separate case, Obama’s Acting Homeland Security Inspector General Charles Edwards
pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the US government on Friday as well.