Former District of Columbia Government Employee Sentenced to 30 Months in Prison for Accepting Bribes from Consultant

            WASHINGTON – Latasha Moore, 39, of Washington, D.C., was sentenced today to 30 months in prison for accepting more than $140,000 in bribes from John Woods, who was a consultant and independent contractor who did business with the D.C. government. 

            The announcement was made today by U.S. Attorney Jessie K. Liu, Timothy M. Dunham, Special Agent in Charge, FBI Washington Field Office, and Daniel W. Lucas, District of Columbia Inspector General.

            On October 11, 2018, Moore pled guilty in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to one count of bribery.  She was sentenced by the Honorable Dabney L. Friedrich.  Following her prison term, Moore will be placed on two years of supervised release.  As part of her sentence, Moore was ordered to forfeit the more than $140,000 in bribes that she received from Woods. 

            According to the statement of offense, Moore started working in 2002 for the D.C. Department of Human Resources (“DCHR”); in 2012, she was promoted to the position of resource allocation analyst.  In that role, among other duties, she was the main point of contact for “Company A,” which was a Maryland-based company that had agreements with DCHR to provide organizational skills training courses and human resources consulting to various D.C. government agencies.

            As noted in the statement of offense, Moore and Woods, who was a consultant employed by Company A, engaged in a scheme in which Moore agreed to protect the government contracts held by Company A and ensure that no complaints about its performance reached others in the District of Columbia government.  The scheme began in approximately July 2014 and ran through August 2017.  In return for her actions, according to the statement of offense, Moore accepted 50 checks and one PayPal money transfer from Woods totaling more than $140,000.

            According to the statement of offense, Moore had suspicions about more than $1 million in invoices that Woods submitted in March 2015 through June 2017 for work that Company A purportedly performed under its contracts with DCHR.  Nonetheless, in return for the money that Woods paid her, Moore advised other D.C. government officials to approve the invoices for payment.  As the scheme continued, according to the statement of offense, Company A discovered that Woods was acting on his own and retaining the profits for himself.  Although Moore knew of Company A’s concerns, she did not relay them to her supervisors and continued to advise other government officials to approve Woods’s invoices.

            Woods, 57, of Washington, D.C., was sentenced on December 20, 2019, by Judge Friedrich to 41 months in prison on charges of bribery and wire fraud arising from this scheme.  As part of his sentence Woods was ordered to pay $564,910.23 in restitution to Company A.

            In announcing the sentence, U.S. Attorney Liu, Special Agent in Charge Dunham, and Inspector General Lucas commended the work of those who investigated the case from the FBI’s Washington Field Office and the Office of the Inspector General of the District of Columbia.  They also expressed appreciation for the work of Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael J. Marando of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, who investigated and prosecuted the matter.