Senior Atlanta Housing official accused of defrauding Section 8 program

A senior executive at the Atlanta Housing Authority who oversaw one of the country’s largest Section 8 housing assistance programs allegedly used a fake name and a shell company to collect funds for a rental property where her family lived.

U.S. Justice Department prosecutors said Tracy Denise Jones, Atlanta Housing’s senior vice president of the Housing Choice Voucher Program, fraudulently collected $36,387 in Section 8 housing assistance payments for a Fayetteville property where a woman identified as M.D. lived with Jones’ two grandchildren until February 2023.

Jones’ son also occasionally lived at the property, according to a criminal information filed Dec. 19 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia in Atlanta.

“Jones allegedly exploited a variety of assistance programs and chose to line her own pockets using an alternate identity, multiple business entities, a false affidavit, and a cadre of associates willing to lie on her behalf,” U.S. Attorney Theodore S. Hertzberg said in a statement.

Atlanta Housing accepted M.D. into the Section 8 program in February 2019, according to the criminal information.

Prosecutors said M.D. submitted a fake lease agreement to show she was living in Atlanta, even though she was living at the Fayetteville home Jones owned.

Jones applied for pandemic relief funds for a company called New Beginning Restoration Project Inc., which she used to rent the home, and for another inactive business, according to prosecutors.

She is accused of filing multiple applications and receiving more than $27,000 in funds.

Jones also secured a $291,780 FHA-insured mortgage by falsely claiming the Fayetteville property was her primary residence as she refinanced, prosecutors said.

As senior vice president over the Housing Choice Voucher Program, Jones was part of an agency serving 27,000 of Atlanta’s neediest households and more than 43,000 people.

She used the fake name Tracy P. Collins to perpetrate the scheme, prosecutors allege, and used the same bank account to receive both Section 8 housing assistance and pandemic relief funds.

Atlanta Housing spokesperson Carolyn Smith said the agency could not comment on the active criminal case.

“Atlanta Housing takes allegations of fraud seriously and maintains strong internal controls, compliance procedures and oversight mechanisms to safeguard public funds,” Smith said.

“We are closely monitoring developments and are receiving information in real time with the public. We will provide additional updates as concrete information becomes available.”

In March 2019, Jones and M.D. submitted a false domestic violence claim to transfer M.D.’s housing benefits out of Atlanta Housing and to the Georgia Department of Community Affairs, falsely claiming M.D.’s boyfriend had physically and verbally abused her and her children, prosecutors said in the criminal information.

The payments continued until early 2023, and officials said Jones persuaded her “friends to lie and present false documents on her behalf.”

In a criminal information, prosecutors said Jones lied during an Atlanta Housing internal investigation in April 2023 by falsely claiming in a sworn affidavit that she did not own the Fayetteville home and had not benefited, directly or indirectly, from Section 8 funds.

In a statement, Special Agent in Charge Jerome Winkle of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Office of Inspector General said Jones had “jeopardized the availability of HUD-assisted housing for those in our most vulnerable communities who rely on housing assistance programs.”

Jones has also been charged with using the shell business to receive $16,000 in COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan funds and about $11,000 in Paycheck Protection Program funds from the U.S. Small Business Administration’s pandemic relief programs.

The criminal information said she claimed the businesses were active, had employees on the payroll and received more than $56,000 in gross revenues in 2019.

After the government denied one of her applications, Jones described herself as a “truly honest business owner” and said she was renting one of her three homes to a low-income family.

“I hear the stories how people abused the PPP loans to establish a lavish lif(e) style. That is not me. My business is small and is growing, but I (am) one of the legitimate and honest business(es) that can use all the help I can” get, she said, according to prosecutors.