NEW ORLEANS (LA)
Times-Picayune and New Orleans Advocate
June 3, 2020
By Gordon Russell
An explosive whistleblower lawsuit unsealed Wednesday alleges that a California engineering firm pushed Xavier University, Dillard University, the Archdiocese of New Orleans and the city’s public school system to cheat the federal government out of more than $100 million meant to rebuild or replace facilities destroyed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
The suit was filed in 2016 by Robert Romero, a former project manager for the engineering firm, AECOM. Romero has been joined by the U.S. Department of Justice, which is seeking the return of the overpayments as well as money paid to AECOM. The department announced Wednesday that Xavier has agreed to repay $12 million to the federal government.
*
And the archdiocese — which recently declared bankruptcy amid the coronavirus pandemic and a flood of lawsuits over alleged molestation by priests — collected about $46 million in overpayments from FEMA, the suit says. The largest chunk of that, more than $36 million, was paid out after the archdiocese claimed that the four top floors of two assisted-living centers had been catastrophically damaged when that was not true.
A recent filing in the archdiocese’s bankruptcy case made glancing reference to the whistleblower suit, though it gave no estimate of the church’s potential liability.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.