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A former co-worker of mine ran nearly this exact same scheme. As an executive for a cable network, he bilked his company out of 8 million dollars. He invoiced the company for video production work that never happened. $25k here, $20k there. He has since served his time of 4+ years in a New York state prison. He lists his role at that cable company on his LinkedIn.

I expect she will do the same and she’ll be back on the market in a few years with her Facebook diversity manager role at the top of her LinkedIn.

Thats why you do background checks when hiring staff.

After being caught once, the judgement will show in your record for 7 years. Most employers would be adviaed to steer clear of such fraudulent employees

In this case, it's not clear if the guilty plea was for embezzlement of all the money or got reduced to some minor misdemeanor that looks like a marijuana conviction on a background check. But still somebody will look past it on check, even Anthony Levandowski got investor money after his convictions.
And forever on internet.
> He lists his role at that cable company on his LinkedIn.

The kind of detail you wouldn’t put in a movie script because it’s too obviously contrived lol

Google exists, you know.
I was more speaking to the audaciousness of it all. I expect many employers will still do their due diligence and with high profile cases like these it’ll be impossible to hide. So I guess the perpetrator ultimately has to own their actions and maybe including these indiscretions in their LinkedIn is inevitable.
Most managers are pointless at large companies, but a diversity manager is one of those signs that your company has reached a new level of bureaucracy.
I hear you like downvotes.
@mods -- could we link to the DoJ post linked to in the article? the article doesn't contribute anything new other than superfluous (at best) images and salacious descriptions.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndga/pr/former-global-diversity...

At least the NYT can handle the traffic
NY Post
Similar scandal was just uncovered at the Jacksonville Jags where a mid-level employee used virtual credit cards to steal upwards of $22 million:

https://fortune.com/2023/12/07/nfl-jacksonville-jaguars-exec...

Looks like he was a gambling addict and used nearly all the money to place bets on super out-of-the-money parlays.

He also used part of the money to put down a retainer with a criminal defense firm lol.
One gamble he ultimately won.
I wonder if the lawyers could be in trouble for "receiving stolen goods"-type charges if they accept payment to represent the guy their own firms is defending.
DEI is a such big industry that, the practitioners are starting corruption. It also usually correlates to the sunset of the industry.
DEI in itself is a corrupt scheme to begin with. The related fields in academia work only towards justifying their own existence, their salaries and positions, by finding proof for their beliefs. Their activism and claims like the one that „diverse teams perform better“ then allow them to move their peers holding useless degrees into made up positions of power in business.
It's corrupt because it's pointless. It's easier to defraud by delivering nothing, when the thing you are supposed to deliver is already nothing.
Got a feeling this is far more widespread than the 1 case the feds found...
Yeah. Rarely does this kind of crime get committed once by a person. Same as the person claiming they only cheated once.

Once people make the choice to go over a taboo threshold, they’ll likely do it multiple times.

They do multiple corporate embezzlement cases per year. Maybe multiple per month.
What, fraud?
I'd like to know why she did it. I'd hope she already made a good living on Facebook TC. And fraud risked getting caught and hurting not only herself but also the larger social mission.
The prosecutor had a similar observation:

... defraud the company of millions of dollars, ignoring the insidious consequences of undermining the importance of her DEI mission,” US Attorney Ryan K. Buchanan said ...

Good, but not great, plus the thrill of it, plus the perception of risk lowers with more successful attempts
I could see doing it 'just this once,' for an emergency - but then you get away with it, and next time it's a little less of an emergency - and eventually, it's just "hey I want more money" so poof now more money magically appears for you.
Corporate DEI is a fad of ostentatious pseudo-sympathy. It's a jobs program for even more bullshit jobs. But one should know they're on the Titanic when there is lots of diversity of the 5 other people in the building who aren't doing anything constructive but are socializing loudly for hours at work with no apparent hustle or purpose.

Meta is spending over $22 billion on servers in 2023 and again in 2024 without a specific product strategy or need. Build it and depreciation will come. Face it, Zuck is an accidental billionaire who had the advantages of Harvard but is now completely out of his depth and lacks a crystalized vision as to where to go from here. It won't be long before Zuck is shown the door after losing large piles of money and failing to make more of it. I give him 1 year or 2 tops.

A bit hard to show someone the door who has more than 50% of the shares vote from dual class shares. He can only be booted if he votes himself out as CEO.
> It won't be long before Zuck is shown the door after losing large piles of money and failing to make more of it.

As long as Zuckerberg prints money, I do not care what he burns up as part of the thousands of experiments being run at his company every day. Similar to Musk, these two have made me multiple millions with no effort expended on my behalf.

META +168% YTD

> Face it, Zuck is an accidental billionaire who had the advantages of Harvard but is now completely out of his depth and lacks a crystalized vision as to where to go from here. It won't be long before Zuck is shown the door after losing large piles of money and failing to make more of it. I give him 1 year or 2 tops.

I'm pretty sure people have been saying exactly that for 15 years now. Maybe someday it will come true...

Couple of questions:

1) What exactly qualifies someone to be a "Head of Diversity"? She has a BA in Poli Sci and a Masters of Public Administration. No formal training in anything HR related. It seems like every job she's ever held has been the same - Sr Manager/Director/Sr Director of DEI at Viacom, Cox, Nike, Facebook.

2) What exactly does a Head of Diversity do? Other than hire a consultant to develop an Employee Diversity Training course and establish metrics/targets for hiring by diversity category. Seems like you could just hire the consultant directly and then let them go after their month or two of work is done.

> What exactly does a Head of Diversity do?

They embezzle company funds.

If you're a person of color, better yet a woman, you can hire yourself out to front a company. That puts the company at the front of the line for government contracts, as well as contracts funded by government money indirectly. You get 30%!

Completely legal.

Some bad internal controls there at FB. Presumably one of her mules rated her out.
Like all sufficiently large organisations, with huge amounts of money, this is less a control problem and more a scale problem.

First, we should note that 4 mil, over 4 years, is a rounding error in the meta financial. Sure it's a lot to me and you (and her) but its less important to fb than a $1 is to you.

Second it's worth noting that spending any amount of money, at scale, is inefficient. Once you get past the stage of "the owner writes all the checks" you need rules, limits and so on. The more the money , the more people spending it. At which point you are hiring people -just- to spend money, and then more people to watch over them, and then even more people to watch over them.

So yeah, once you have enough people, you'll inevitable have some that are comfortable fleecing some out. Since preventing that is infinite oversight, it's simpler to just accept that it'll happen as a cost of doing business.

On the one hand you can describe this as "bad internal controls". On the other hand, if the controls cost more than the losses then that's "worse".

Context matters.

”The feds said Furlow-Smiles, who had access to company credit cards and the ability to approve invoices as part of her role at the company”

It’s a basic controls issue.

Having an employee approve their own submitted invoices violates even the most basic accounting measures.

> Sure it's a lot to me and you (and her) but its less important to fb than a $1 is to you.

That is almost surely wrong, even after taking into account the declining marginal utility of money. FB's net income for 2022 was $23.1B. $1M is 1 part in 23100 for them.

$1 for most any SWE in the US is ~4-20x less concentrated when compared by annual income.

When I hear about a case like this it actually warms my heart. As the 20th century ideological parties/governments/organizations demonstrate, compared to true believers, criminals faking it to enrich themselves are a lesser evil by far!
Would these count as civil cases or criminal cases? Or is that up to the prosecution?
Both. Criminal (brought by the government) for the punishment, civil (brought by the victim) to recover the damages.
I suppose psychopathy and machiavellianism are diversity points as well. Should of just done insider trading like the rest of the world leaders. It's harder to prove in court evidently.
“This week on: American Greed”
What a stupid comment. Greed is universal, it's not especially American. Furthermore America is one of those countries where you can steal millions and still end up in jail. In many countries a few million is enough to avoid jail forever.
It is a reference to a TV show: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Greed
Need to learn the many different kinds of greed, in order to understand this “American Greed”.
Remember folks, real diversity comes from people who look different.