On May 24, Salvador Franco Jr. and Mirella Flores were found guilty of 37 felony counts for fraud charges involving the Supplemental Job Displacement Benefit voucher.
Franco was the CFO of Graduates Do Succeed Institute and a 20% owner of Technical School Inc., where he was also Director and CFO. Flores was also an employee for both schools.
From 2015 to 2017, Franco and Flores offered to provide workers’ compensation claimants with at-home or off-site training for a few hours a week in exchange for their Supplemental Job Displacement Benefit voucher, which ranged from $4,000 to $10,000. However, the pair listed the training as being several hundred hours in length, which required full-time attendance at one of the school’s campuses. Additionally, they also offered the claimants monetary payment for their vouchers and to not attend any training at all.
Pleading no contest, the pair was ordered to pay $88,000 in restitution, in addition to $62,000 to the Department of Insurance for investigation costs. Franco and Flores were also sentenced to three years of formal probation and 90 days in jail, but the jail sentences were stayed and substituted for 275 hours of community service for Franco and 250 hours for Flores.