$16.8M Jersey ‘score’
Minority hire-&-fire ‘scam’ ’
A New Jersey subprime lender linked to a protégé of Jordan “Wolf of Wall Street” Belfort tried to scam state taxpayers out of $16.8 million by hiring — then quickly firing — more than 200 minority employees in exchange for economic incentives, a new complaint charges.
Whistleblower Kerrie-Ann Murray, 40, was payroll manager for World Business Lenders from 2015 through 2017 when she was fired after allegedly refusing to falsify employment data.
Murray filed a complaint with the state’s Division of Human Rights last week over her ouster.
World Business Lenders, which gives loans to small-business owners at rates of up to 125 percent, relocated from New York to Jersey City in 2016 to take advantage of tax breaks.
In 2014, Bloomberg News reported that the company’s employee trainer was Bryan Herman, who worked for Belfort at Stratton Oakmont and narrowly escaped jail time by turning snitch. Since then, Herman has left the firm. A company rep declined to comment on his departure.
Murray’s complaint claims that company executives including CEO Doug W. Naidus and Chief Compliance Officer Andy Occhino “conspired to defraud the taxpayers of the state of New Jer-rsey and the City of Jersey City byy claiming to hire ‘ employable’ Af-frican Americans and other per-sons of color to qualify for en-hanced government grants andd other tax benefits.”
The executives “made a false presentation before the New Jersey Economic Development Au-thority,” according to the filing,, and by February 2016 the Author-rity had approved a $16.8 millionn tax break for World Businessss Lenders over 10 years, the filingng says.
That summer Murray oversaww the hiring of almost 280 peoplele from the state’s Department of La-abor pool for telemarketing.
But shortly after Christmas allall the employees had been let go,o, Murray claims. That’s when herer bosses “instructed her to falsify”y” the number of blacks and Hispan-nics still employed at the firm, thehe complaint states.
She refused, and was canned in September 2017.
“It’s not fair what they’ve donene to her,” said Murray’s attorney,y, Eric Sanders. “They tried to use race to manipulate the system and when she didn’t’ go along with it they fired her.”
An attorney for World Business Lenders declined to comment on the pending litigation.