Former Tri-Cities business owner stole $43,000 in fraud scheme from state agency

The owner of a former Pasco-based business admitted using the identities of Spanish-speaking interpreters to bill the state $43,300 for appointments that never happened.

Carla C. Moreno, 33, paid the full amount of restitution to the Washington state Department of Labor & Industries (L&I) before pleading guilty recently in Franklin County Superior Court.

Moreno apologized to the court, the prosecutor, her wife, her mother and “everybody involved in this situation.”

“I’m sorry that I put you through all of this unnecessarily,” she said. “This investigation has not only been a nightmare to me, but also to everyone that is close to me, and for that I do apologize.”

Moreno added that she had learned “only one single misstep, such as lack of better control or of strictness, can ruin everything.”

The Seattle woman, who now works as a real estate broker and investor, was sentenced to 6 months in the county jail with all but one month suspended.

Judge Sam Swanberg ordered her to serve 10 of those days behind bars, and the remaining 20 days on electronic home monitoring.

Moreno’s plea to third-degree theft, a gross misdemeanor, was reduced from first-degree theft and first-degree identity theft.

‘Slap in the face’

Assistant Attorney General Barbara Serrano said the plea agreement was not reached easily, but takes into consideration the seriousness of the crime, the amount of loss to the state, the age of the case and Moreno’s criminal history.

“Ms. Moreno’s theft of public funds in this case was calculated, organized and intentional,” Serrano said in court.

In one 4-month period alone, she submitted 558 fraudulent billing documents to the Department of Labor & Industries for interpreting services that were not approved under state guidelines, services that did not occur or interpreting services that had already been paid.”

The prosecutor added that while the state agency had the monetary loss, the other victims were the certified interpreters whose names and identification numbers were used even though they no longer worked for Moreno.

“They did not know that she was using their identities to receive payments until an L&I investigator notified them,” said Serrano, noting that some of them are not happy with the resolution.

“They feel that Ms. Moreno is getting off too easy by being allowed to plead to a gross misdemeanor,” she said. “They feel that, frankly one told me she felt that it’s a slap in the face. She said, ‘We live a life where we do not break the law, and yet there are people who don’t and they get away with it.’”

Moreno was the sole owner of two businesses, “The Language Spot” and “Language Spot,” from 2009 to 2017.

She hired independent contractors to interpret at medical and physical therapy appointments for injured workers who had filed L&I injury claims.

A certified Spanish-speaking interpreter, Moreno operated her businesses out of a west Pasco home. She claimed to have handled some jobs herself by interpreting for workers at appointments.

However, L&I officials say that while Moreno said she was working in the Tri-Cities, she actually was living in Seattle and attending classes at the University of Washington.

Non-certified interpreters used

She also is known as Carla Cynthia Montes de Oca Moreno and Carla Moreno Montgomery.

Moreno was responsible for submitting appointment records for language interpretation services so the state agency could track and verify work performed and pay the bills. Then, she was supposed to pay her contractors once the money hit her business account, court documents said.

Officials say that while she was giving the name and provider number of certified interpreters and forging their signatures for payment, she really was using non-certified interpreters or billing for appointments that did not happen from 2014 to 2017.

The state only pays for certified interpreters who meet certain standards and pass proficiency exams. Their services may include scheduling appointments for injured workers through the provider’s office and attending the appointments with them.

The non-certified interpreters recruited by Moreno included “friends of friends, friends of family, or women she had met while working for other interpreting agencies,” documents said.

Moreno stopped billing the state agency in the fall of 2017.

One language interpreter told the judge at sentencing that Moreno was signing her former name on forged documents. She called the plea agreement disgraceful, and said she was sick to her stomach with the scheme orchestrated by Moreno.

Another interpreter, Ramon Bueno, said Moreno used his information knowing it was wrong, and he suspected “irregular things” were going on.

“It really bothers me that she used my information without my consent,” he said.

Now works in Seattle

C. James Frush, Moreno’s defense attorney, said they had a very difficult time convincing the Washington state Attorney General’s Office to do this resolution.

He recognized that because of the plea to a gross misdemeanor and a shorter jail term, Moreno might be able to stay in the United States instead of facing deportation to Mexico, where she hasn’t lived in 15 years.

She no longer provides interpreter services for L&I.

Judge Sam Swanberg said he was sympathetic to Moreno’s situation, but added that she got herself into it by her own choice.

“I’m not going to say by making a bad choice. It’s not just a matter of making a bad choice, it’s by making a criminal choice. It sounds like making many criminal choices over a period of time,” said Swanberg.

“You’ve chosen to defraud the people of the state of Washington by ... fraudulently entering billings and submitting them in a manner to obtain funds that you were not entitled to.”

Violation of identity

On top of that, the judge said, Moreno used the names of her interpreters without their permission as part of her scheme. He reiterated the comments made by a few interpreters during the hearing.

“It’s a violation of their person, a violation of their identity, and we all treasure our identities and our good reputations. And when people try to steal that and sully (their reputation), it’s very harmful and a violation of our security,” Swanberg continued.

Moreno has harmed many people through her actions, and that’s something she can’t give back, he said.

And, given that Moreno has made “many strides” in this country establishing herself with her education and continued entrepreneurship, Swanberg said it “seems pretty reckless that this was something that was not important to you.”

Moreno will be on probation two years.

The restitution to L&I — which was paid through Moreno’s attorney — was ordered as part of the sentence. The amount included about $7,500 she improperly received by using the identities of three certified interpreters from 2015 to 2017, the department said.

An L&I auditor initially examined the business’s billing paperwork for all of 2015. The auditor found so many billing irregularities that she narrowed the scope of a detailed audit to a 4-month period in 2015 that became the basis of the criminal case, the department noted in a news release.

“This was a calculated and deceitful attempt to steal thousands of dollars from the workers’ compensation system,” Celeste Monahan, acting assistant director of L&I’s Fraud Prevention and Labor Standards division, said in the release. “That’s money that employers and employees pay to help injured workers heal and return to work.

“We stopped this fraud and we can now put this stolen money back into the workers’ comp fund.”