Judge sentences final trio member in meal fraud plot

Nonprofit failed to help poor kids

The final member of a trio who defrauded the government by not providing meals to poor children was sentenced Tuesday in federal court in Pittsburgh.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office said Tanisha Jackson, 50, of Dallas, was sentenced to three years in prison by District Judge Arthur Schwab after she pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The judge also ordered her to pay restitution of $1.5 million to the U.S. Department of Agriculture and to forfeit more than $427,000.

Jackson had admitted last year that she and Charles Simpson and Paige Jackson, her daughter, operated Helping Others In Need Inc. as a nonprofit organization that enrolled in programs funded by the USDA to provide meals to needy children after school and during the summer.

But a release from the U.S. attorney said Jackson admitted she caused the submission of false enrollment documentation for the programs. Jackson also acknowledged that she previously had been excluded from participating in the same feeding programs in Texas and Arkansas but falsely certified that none of the entity’s principals had been excluded from the feeding programs.

“Jackson further admitted causing HOIN to submit reimbursement claims for hundreds of thousands of meals that were never served to eligible children by either inflating the number of meals that, in fact, were served, or by seeking reimbursements for meals purportedly served on days on which the identified feeding site was not operating at all,” the news release said.

HOIN got reimbursements of more than $4 million between 2015 and 2019.

Prosecutors said Jackson and Simpson spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in HOIN reimbursements on “shopping sprees at high-end apparel stores, personal air travel and lodging, and the acquisition of at least nine luxury vehicles, including a Bentley, two Land Rovers, two Maseratis, two Mercedes, a Hummer, and a Porsche.”

Simpson and Paige Jackson separately pleaded guilty and were sentenced to 30 months’ imprisonment and three years’ probation, respectively.

According to the release, “When announcing Jackson’s sentence, Judge Schwab rejected her claim that she was less culpable than Simpson, noting that Jackson had brought her own daughter, Paige Jackson, into the conspiracy.”