WILMINGTON, Del. – U.S. Attorney David C. Weiss announced today that landlords Goodfish Enterprises, LLC; Reliant Property Management Company; and Christopher Lukacs have agreed to pay $430,000 to resolve allegations that they violated the False Claims Act during their participation in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Housing Choice Voucher Program (HCVP), commonly known as “Section 8.” The HCVP is the federal government’s primary program for helping low-income families, the elderly, and the disabled to afford decent, safe, and sanitary housing in the private market.
Goodfish, Reliant, and Lukacs own more than 90 properties in the Sparrow Run housing development in Newark, Delaware, many of which have been leased to low-income residents receiving rental assistance through the HCVP. HCVP regulations require landlords to certify that they are not charging a higher rent to HCVP tenants than they charge to unassisted tenants in comparable housing units. In a lawsuit filed in December 2020, the United States alleged that, going back to at least January 2015, Goodfish, Reliant, and Lukacs had charged HCVP participants higher rents than unassisted tenants. The United States also alleged that Goodfish and Lukacs provided false information on HCVP forms regarding the rents they received from unassisted tenants to justify the inflated rents they sought to charge for HCVP rentals. As part of the settlement agreement, Reliant and Goodfish also agreed to reduce...
A popular social media conspiracy theory about a recent cluster of hantavirus cases claims that the word “hanta” means “scam,” “fraud,” or “nonsense” in “Hebrew slang.” That’s more or less where t...