Former Louisiana benefits employee admits $200,000 wire fraud

What happened

A former Louisiana Workforce Commission employee has pleaded guilty to wire fraud after obtaining at least $200,000 in pandemic unemployment benefits, the US Department of Justice announced on 25 June 2025.

Paris Lashay Haynes, 28, of Baton Rouge, used credentials issued for her work to alter about 40 claimant accounts and divert payments, according to admissions accompanying her plea. She appeared before US District Judge John W. deGravelles.

Haynes worked as a customer service representative from approximately April 2020 to March 2021, helping people with unemployment insurance claims. Her role gave her access to individual accounts through the commission’s online benefits system, HiRE.

According to the department, she targeted inactive accounts and changed their usernames, passwords and email addresses without authorisation. She then signed into those accounts and replaced payment details, including bank routing information, so benefits would reach accounts she owned or controlled.

Changing the payment destination was only part of the process. Haynes also submitted false weekly certifications in claimants’ names, prompting the commission to release unemployment funds intended for those individuals.

The department said she accessed HiRE from her residence in Texas and other locations. The conduct involved interstate electronic communications, which formed the basis of the wire fraud case.

The background

The benefits came through Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, or PUA. The March 2020 CARES Act introduced emergency financial support during the Covid-19 pandemic and broadened unemployment assistance for people who had lost work.

The Louisiana Workforce Commission administered PUA in the state through its self-service HiRE platform. For online claims and account access, its website recorded information about interactions with the system and linked it to details such as claimant names, addresses and bank accounts.

The department’s account describes misuse of legitimate employee access rather than an outsider breaking into the service. Haynes had permission to use the system for her job, but not to take over claimant accounts or direct their benefits elsewhere.

That distinction is central to insider risk: an account can belong to an authorised worker while the actions taken through it are unauthorised. Here, changes to account access details, payment destinations and benefit certifications together enabled the diversion of public funds.

A separate Maryland unemployment benefits fraud case involved a contractor employee who used access to a state benefits system to divert payments and approve fraudulent claims for fees, according to the Justice Department. Both cases concern the misuse of access granted to support benefits administration.

What people are saying

Acting US Attorney Ellison C. Travis announced Haynes’s plea in a release from the US Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Louisiana. The Department of Justice is the source of the reporting and attributed its description of the scheme to her plea admissions.

The department also described a second form of fraud. From around March 2021 through at least June 2022, Haynes submitted PUA applications in her own name, falsely claiming that the pandemic had left her unemployed.

According to the release, Haynes knew her employment had instead ended because of her own misconduct. The department did not identify the specific misconduct that led to her dismissal.

What happens next

The Department of Labor’s Office of Inspector General is investigating the case, according to the announcement. Assistant US Attorney Kristen Lundin Craig is prosecuting it.

The release gives no sentencing date, sentence or restitution order. It also does not describe whether affected claimants were reimbursed or whether the commission changed its access controls after the fraud.

For organisations reviewing comparable risks, the account points to several activities that warrant scrutiny together: changes to login details, replacement of bank information and renewed claims on inactive accounts. The release does not explain how investigators detected Haynes’s conduct, so it cannot establish which checks exposed the scheme.