BREAKING: Arizona grand jury indicts duo for $100,000 school voucher fraud

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes announced Monday another round of fraud charges in the state’s school voucher program involving over $100,000 awarded to the nonexistent students of fabricated parents.

An investigation by Mayes’s office led to a grand jury’s decision to indict Johnny Lee Bowers and Ashley Merideth Hewitt on 60 felony counts of fraud, forgery, and money laundering. The duo allegedly forged documents such as birth certificates and utility bills to use as proof of Arizona residency—while living in Colorado—for five different families made up of 50 qualifying students. Of the 50, 43 are believed to be nonexistent “ghost children.”

“It was the goal of the conspiracy that the defendants, Colorado residents, obtain funds from the Arizona Empowerment Scholarship Account Program by submitting applications for children, both real and fictitious,” the indictment states. “They used this money for their own personal living expenses while continuing to reside in Colorado.”

The Arizona Department of Education (ADE) awarded Bowers and Hewitt $110,000 during an 18-month period beginning in December 2022, shortly after the state’s Republican-led legislature expanded its voucher program. To date, no guardrails for transparency or oversight have been added to the program, resulting in rampant fraud and a consistent deficit in Arizona’s education budget.

While the ADE approved the vouchers, Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne said his office identified the potential fraud and alerted the Attorney General, sparking the criminal investigation.

“As a former Arizona Attorney General, I am determined as Superintendent to eliminate any fraud within the ESA program,” Horne said in a statement. “I am pleased that prosecutions are following in the cases we sent to The Attorney General’s office.”

Similar charges were brought against three ADE employees in February, though their alleged scheme appears much more efficient. Prosecutors claim the trio forged documents for 17 students and defrauded the state of more than $600,000. The employees began defrauding the state in 2021 using the information of real children, but expanded their operation to include fake students after the voucher program became universal.

Arizona Rep. Nancy Gutierrez, D-Tucson, has pushed for years for more oversight of the voucher program, and said the continued fraud is evidence that more accountability is necessary. As a high school teacher and member of the Education Committee, Gutierrez described what she sees as a blatant double standard: ever-increasing scrutiny of public school spending while voucher spending gets a handwave and a blank check from Republican lawmakers.

“There are no real safeguards against fraud, no real way to know what this money is going towards,” Gutierrez told The Copper Courier. “I’m sure this won’t be the last fraud that we see, and I’m really grateful that Attorney General Mayes looked into it.”

While she has introduced several pieces of legislation that would add the same regulations on voucher spending that are in effect for public school spending, Gutierrez said those proposals were “denied right away” by Republican leadership.

Enrolling fictional children to attend public school, for example, would be remedied almost immediately. Bowers and Hewitt, however, were able to enroll dozens of nonexistent students and reap the benefits for years.

The indictment names 30 fictitious students and outlines a complex web of families created by Bowers and Hewitt. Each family had six children receiving voucher funds, which prosecutors say were used to fund the pair’s personal living expenses.

Bowers and Hewitt were issued a summons to appear in court, but a court date has not yet been set.