VA employee pleads guilty to stealing nearly $2M in medical equipment

A Fulton County man who was employed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has pleaded guilty to stealing nearly $2 million in medical equipment.

Kevin Rumph Jr., 41, of Fairburn, pleaded guilty Monday to theft charges related to stealing hundreds of medical devices and reselling them between 2013 and 2021, Acting U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia Kurt Erskine said in a news release. As a purchasing agent for the VA’s Prosthetic Department, Rumph used his VA credit card to buy hundreds of Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP) machines which he stole and resold.

Rumph had worked for the VA at Fort McPherson in southwest Atlanta since 2012, Erskine said. As a purchasing agent for the Prosthetic Department, he approved and purchased a wide variety of prosthetics, sensory aids and other medical equipment on behalf of patients and their healthcare practitioners.

In addition to those legitimate purchases, Rumph also used his government-issued credit card to buy CPAP machines from a vendor in Alabama, which he would steal and sell to a company in Ohio, Erskine said. CPAP machines are used to treat certain types of sleep apnea.

Over the course of about eight years, Rumph stole hundreds of machines and resold them at a cost of nearly $2 million to the VA, the department of the federal government charged with providing health care to the country’s military veterans.

“As a VA employee, Rumph’s job was to serve those who served and protected our nation,” Erskine said in a press statement. “His greed was a betrayal of trust that deprived veterans of the scarce resources needed by them to live productive lives.”