By Bay City News.
A Vallejo woman is facing charges alleging she embezzled more than $250,000 from a nonprofit organization that provided assistance to students in San Francisco, according to a joint announcement by federal authorities.
Athena Harven, 53, was indicted Wednesday in San Francisco federal court on four counts of wire fraud in connection with a scheme she ran from 2015 to 2018, according to the US Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California.
She was the director of operations for a now-defunct nonprofit organization that provided academic support and employment assistance to students in the Sunnydale and Visitacion Valley neighborhoods of San Francisco, prosecutors said.
The organization was funded in part by the city and county of San Francisco, as well as the federal Office of Housing and Urban Development Inspector General.
The indictment alleges that Harven wrote 119 checks on the nonprofit's bank account and prepared documents to suggest that the funds from many of those checks would be used to pay the nonprofit's payroll taxes, but allegedly deposited the checks into bank accounts she controlled and spent the funds to enrich herself.
The indictment further alleges that Harven took various steps to hide his fraud from the nonprofit organization, allowing it to continue.
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