How federal telework fraud actually gets caught, and why it takes so long

Nehemie Almonor kept three government laptops open side by side on her desk, each signed into a different agency’s network, so a message from any supervisor would find her apparently online no matter which one checked. For three years, the human resources specialist from King George, Virginia, held full-time telework positions at the Transportation Security Administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Food and Drug Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Air Force Reserves, all at once, according to federal prosecutors. She pleaded guilty to wire fraud this spring, one of several federal employees caught in recent months running strikingly similar schemes.

Why one telework job can hide another

Federal law has long barred employees from holding more than one full-time government position at the same time without approval, a restriction codified at 5 U.S.C. 5533. What the law has never required is a mechanism for checking it.

Each agency runs its own personnel and payroll system, so when HUD hires an analyst or CISA brings on a cybersecurity specialist, there is no routine, real-time way to learn that the same person is already drawing a full salary somewhere else. An office desk used to make the arrangement hard to sustain, since a supervisor could see an empty chair. But telework removed that tell, letting employees appear present in two or more places by simply staying logged in.

The timesheets that do not add up

Crissy Monique Baker, a management and program analyst at HUD, held two additional full-time contractor jobs, doing human resources work for AmeriCorps and then the National Institutes of Health, without telling any of the three employers about the others. In June 2022 alone she certified to all three that she had worked 26 hours in a single day on 13 separate occasions, causing an estimated loss of $225,866, according to the HUD Office of Inspector General.

A former Department of Homeland Security cybersecurity employee, Richeline Fung, went further, billing 33-hour and 32-hour workdays in February 2022 while holding six separate contractor roles alongside her full-time job at the agency’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

“Fung abused her positions as a federal employee and government contractor,” said Assistant Attorney General Colin M. McDonald of the Justice Department’s National Fraud Enforcement Division, announcing her guilty plea in September. In both cases, it was the arithmetic on the timesheets, not any manager’s observation, that eventually gave the scheme away.

Untangling a scheme no single supervisor can see

A timesheet only shows what one agency paid for, which is precisely why an individual supervisor rarely catches this kind of fraud. Piecing together Baker’s overlapping jobs required a joint investigation by inspectors general from ten separate offices, including AmeriCorps, HUD, the Department of Energy, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Homeland Security, the General Services Administration, Health and Human Services and the Treasury and Defense Department watchdogs, along with the FBI.

Almonor’s scheme came to light differently: the Transportation Security Administration received repeated complaints that she was unreachable during hours she had certified as working, prompting an internal investigation rather than a payroll audit. Baker, for her part, told investigators she had not actually shortchanged anyone, insisting her “exceptional time management, concentration and organizational skills” let her finish every assignment, a defense the government did not accept.

What Washington has done, and what it has not

The Trump administration’s broader push to end remote work has shrunk the population capable of running these schemes almost by accident. Full-time telework hours across the federal government fell by more than 75 percent between January and October 2025, and by mid-2026 roughly 90 percent of federal employees were working on-site full time, according to data the Office of Personnel Management has released.

OPM’s revised telework guide, issued in December 2025, also directs agencies to establish procedures to “monitor and verify” that anyone still working remotely under an exemption is actually doing so. Separately, Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa introduced the Dismantling Double Dippers Act in the Senate in September 2025, which would require a regular, governmentwide cross-check of federal payrolls rather than leaving detection to chance complaints or joint investigations after the fact. “Bureaucrats are pulling a fast one, double-dipping from the federal payroll without lifting a finger,” Ernst said when she introduced the bill, which remains pending in committee.

Restitution from just the recent cases, Baker’s roughly $256,000, Almonor’s nearly $300,000 and Fung’s approximately $250,000, adds up to close to $800,000, though no agency publishes a running total specific to telework double-dipping, since each case is prosecuted separately by whichever U.S. Attorney’s office happens to catch it.

Whether the return-to-office mandate outlasts the next change of administration is an open question, and telework, if it expands again, will bring the same structural gap with it: separate agencies, separate payrolls, and no single supervisor positioned to see the whole picture.