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A federal judge last month sentenced an information technology professional to 15 months in prison and ordered him to pay more than $1.2 million in connection with a five-year-plus scheme to defraud the Dublin-based apparel company he worked at, according to prosecutors.
Trenton Robinson, 47, had pleaded guilty to mail fraud and filing a false tax return, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Prosecutors said Robinson worked as a manager in the IT department of the Dublin company and engaged in the scheme between 2010 and 2015. The U.S. Attorney’s Office statement did not identify the company — referring to it as “Company A” in the press release — but court documents state that $1.1 million of the restitution will be paid to Ross Department Store and its attorneys.
According to prosecutors, Robinson’s scheme coincided with a time period in which Castro & Gregg Technologies (C&G) served as a major IT vendor for the apparel company, acting as a staffing agency providing contractors and technical support on IT projects.
Robinson approved invoices for C&G hiring and work done for the company, and C&G had a practice of overbilling or billing in advance for work that had not yet been done, prosecutors said, adding that Robinson instructed C&G to use vague terms when billing future work.
“In some instances, this billing practice meant that he approved invoices that were part legitimate but included padded costs or fake line items. In other instances, it meant approving invoices that were made up and had no connection to any specific project or actual work,” prosecutors said. “This practice created a multimillion-dollar slush fund at C&G.”
Prosecutors said the scheme also involved Robinson diverting some of the money for his personal benefit, such as having C&G pay his wife a “consulting” fee. Initially the fees were paid in her name, but later C&G paid the fees through entities created by Robinson’s wife, at Robinson’s direction.
The scheme netted more than $1.1 million through C&G from his company, prosecutors said. For the tax years 2012 through 2015, Robinson and his wife willfully failed to report their income on the tax returns, according to court records.
The investigation was a collaboration between the FBI and the IRS, with prosecution by assistant U.S. attorney Benjamin Kingsley. The sentence was handed down by Judge Richard Seeborg of the U.S. District Court, Northern District of California.
