Polk County university official behind payments scam sent to prison

Brian Carroll, a 47-year-old Tennessee man, will serve 15 months in federal prison for a scheme that defrauded Southeastern University in Lakeland out of $155,000.

Carroll was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Charlene Honeywell last week. Honeywell also ordered he pay $112,500 in restitution and serve three years of supervised release when he leaves prison.

He had pled guilty to one count of wire fraud in January and was facing 20 years.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, here's what happened:

Carroll was an executive vice president of Southeastern, a Christian university in Lakeland with about 2,300 students, when he came up with the plot to defraud the school.

Prosecutors say that as the university’s chief operating officer he was responsible for strategy, financial operations and legal affairs. Sometime in 2016, the university’s leadership decided that it was interested in rebranding and updating its web image. Carroll was one of the officials tasked to oversee the project.

Unbeknownst to the university, Carroll had created a corporation in New Mexico and opened a bank account and an email address in the company’s name. In his official role at Southeastern, he secretly hired the New Mexico company he’d created and controlled to do the work on the web project.

The department says that over a six-month period, Carroll’s corporation generated a contract and produced invoices for work that was actually being done by a New York company he had hired.

The scheme was discovered only after Southeastern had spent more than $180,000 on the project. When university officials discovered the scheme, they learned the real cost of the project was about $30,000 less than the school had been charged.

Carroll was immediately suspended, and his contract was terminated in early 2017.

Honeywell ordered Carroll report to a to-be determined prison by 2 p.m. June 23.