UIA employee Antonia Brown accused of working with Kiannia Mitchell, Angela Johnson in scheme

A longtime Michigan unemployment worker helped two of her friends who filed more than 123 false claims to steal $1.6 million in benefits, officials said.

Scheme details

A criminal complaint filed Wednesday (May 18) says that between March 2020 and June 2021, Kiannia Mitchell, 32, of Romulus, and Angela Johnson, 47, of Detroit, operated a scheme to file and/or access more than 123 Pandemic Unemployment Assistance claims. The pair stole about $1.6 million in federal funds that were meant for PUA and UIA benefit payments, according to authorities.

Antonia Brown, a state of Michigan employee since 2002, was working as an Unemployment Insurance examiner at the time, officials said. She was assigned to the Benefit Payment Control Unit and responsible for reviewing, approving, and making decisions on PUA and UIA claims.

Brown, 47, of Detroit, accessed about 110 of the claims filed by Mitchell and Johnson, records show. She altered or authorized payment on 101 of them, according to the criminal complaint.

“Brown had no legitimate reason to access or modify, let alone approve, the subject claims, indicating Brown used her position as an employee to inappropriately access and wrongfully release payments tied to the claims associated with Mitchell’s and Johnson’s IP addresses,” investigators found.

Michigan’s UIA uses software that flags certain claims for review when it recognizes a...

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