Ocean State Today

Attorney General Peter F. Neronha today announced that an East Greenwich business owner has been ordered by a Providence County Superior Court magistrate to pay $422,000 in restitution for defrauding the State’s Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP) by falsely claiming certain children were enrolled at his daycare centers, and billing CCAP for non-existent enrollments.

On June 7, 2023, Superior Court Magistrate Patrick T. Burke sentenced Keun Soo Han (age 50) to a three-year deferred sentence and ordered him to pay a total of $422,000 in restitution to the State. The defendant entered a plea of nolo contendere to one count of Obtaining Money Under False Pretenses over $1,500.

Had the case proceeded to trial, the State was prepared to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that from July 2018 to February 2020, the defendant intentionally misrepresented attendance records at his Taekwondo facilities to fraudulently collect $422,000 in CCAP benefits. CCAP is a program that can subsidizes the cost of childcare for Rhode Island families. 

In June 2021, the Rhode Island Department of Administration’s Office of Internal Audits (OIA) reported their investigation of US Taekwondo Center, Inc., with two locations in Rhode Island, to the Rhode Island State Police (RISP) Financial Crimes Unit. During their investigation, OIA uncovered substantial fraudulent overpayments to the Taekwondo Center between January 2019 and March 2020.

OIA launched their investigation after a referral from the Rhode Island Department of Human Services (DHS) Office of Childcare (OCC). The referral claimed that a specific child was enrolled at the Taekwondo Center while simultaneously being enrolled at a separate learning center from July 2019 to December 2019.

On December 7, 2019, DHS notified the defendant that his enrollment logs were under review, and subsequently, on that same date, 33 children were disenrolled from the Taekwondo Center’s Elmwood location and 36 were disenrolled from the Center’s Branch Avenue location. Furthermore, OIA determined that attendance records for 187 children at the Elmwood location and 164 children at the Branch Avenue location were misrepresented, billing DHS by stating that the children were present for childcare services when they were not attending the Center.

Moreover, investigators interviewed former employees of the defendant, who reported direct instructions from the defendant to mark absent children as present and to continue billing CCAP for students who were no longer enrolled at the Taekwondo Center. 

Assistant Attorney General Daniel Guglielmo of the Office of the Attorney General, Sergeant Michael Brock of RISP, and Kimberly Seebeck, Justin Leung, and Terri Linehan of OIA led the investigation and prosecution of the case.

Original source can be found here.