LIHUE — A California woman was sentenced in a Honolulu federal court on Thursday for scheming to receive her late father’s disability checks for 21 years after the former Kauai man died. After pleading guilty to defrauding the state of
LIHUE — A California woman was sentenced in a Honolulu federal court on Thursday for scheming to receive her late father’s disability checks for 21 years after the former Kauai man died.
After pleading guilty to defrauding the state of Hawaii out of $398,258 in September, Lynsie Katherine Williams, 58, of Redlands, Calif., was sentenced to 21 months in prison and three years of supervised release.
U.S. District Court Judge Helen Gilmore ordered that Williams pay $398,887 in restitution to the Department of Labor and Industrial Relations Disability Compensation Division. She must also perform 300 hours of community service.
“Frauds like this cost all of us money as taxpayers, and the FBI will keep working these cases until the message is received that this is unacceptable behavior,” said FBI Special Agent Tom Simon.
Williams never lived on Kauai as far as the FBI investigation could determine, Simon said. Her father, the late Edwin Callison, was a former Kauai Humane Society employee who was injured while performing his job of throwing animal carcasses into furnaces on June 1, 1976.
Callison qualified for state of Hawaii Permanent Total Disability benefits, and the state sent the checks to a joint bank account in the name of Callison and Williams, who acted as his caregiver in California.
Callison lived in an assisted living facility in his final years and died in 1990. Yet, his disability account remained active and money continued to be withdrawn as Williams forged Callison’s signature on state benefits forms to continue receiving disability payments.
In 1998 and 2000, Williams completed the appropriate government form to change the status of her late father to, “living, disabled, and under the care of a physician for his injury.” In 2011, she changed the status to “living and disabled, but no longer under a physicians care for the injury.”
After 21 years, an investigation conducted by the State of Hawaii Department of the Attorney General and the Honolulu FBI ncovered the fraud.
Wiliams was indicted on mail fraud charges by a federal grand jury in Honolulu on Aug. 14, 2012. She pleaded guilty on Sept. 9, 2013 to the superseding charge of mail fraud and in exchange, two more counts of money laundering were dismissed.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Larry Butrick prosecuted the case.
Williams was represented by Assistant Federal Public Defender Salina Althof.
Williams was not considered a flight risk or a danger to the community and was out of jail on bond for the duration of her case. This is her first prison sentence.
Since a quarter century has passed, no one at the Kauai Humane Society had any memory of serving with Callison.
