Former Southeastern official Brian Carroll receives 15-month sentence for fraud scheme
Brian Carroll, a former executive at Southeastern University, has been sentenced to 15 months in prison for wire fraud committed while he worked for the Lakeland school.
U.S. District Judge Charlene E. Honeywell issued the sentence to Carroll, 47, the Department of Justice said in a news release Thursday afternoon. Carroll, who now lives in New Market, Tennessee, had entered a guilty plea in January to culminate a case dating to 2017.
Carroll was serving as executive vice president at Southeastern when he took on a project to redesign the website and digital brand of the university’s president, Kent Ingle, according to court records. Carroll then created a scheme to enrich himself by establishing an anonymous company based in New Mexico and creating a bank account for the company, both of which he controlled, the release said.
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The DOJ statement said that neither Ingle nor the Southeastern board of directors was aware of Carroll’s connection to the limited liability corporation.
The company submitted a bid to perform the web rebranding project for $185,000, and Carroll recommended and promoted the acceptance of the contract, the DOJ said. Southeastern made a series of wire payments to the company for work done on the project.
The indictment from August 2021 lists five wire transfers totaling $114,500.
Meanwhile, Carroll contracted with an unrelated company based in New York to do the actual work and create the new website, the release said. The New York company charged Carroll’s company $30,000 for its work, meaning that Carroll attempted to defraud Southeastern out of approximately $155,000, the DOJ said.
Southeastern University discovered Carroll’s connection to the New Mexico company, and its board of directors suspended him and soon fired him in early 2017. The school did not publicly give a reason for his departure.
The FBI investigated the case with assistance from the Lakeland Police Department, the release said. Assistant United States Attorney Jay L. Hoffer led the prosecution.
In addition to the 15-month sentence, Judge Honeywell ordered Carroll to forfeit $42,000, representing the proceeds of the one count of wire fraud for which he pled guilty under an agreement with prosecutors.
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The payment was a federal crime because all of the wire transfers went through computer servers in Texas or Virginia, according to court records.
“Since December 2016 when Southeastern University reported Brian Carroll’s criminal activity to law enforcement, the university has worked with federal authorities to bring this matter to a conclusion,” SEU spokesperson Dana Davis said in an emailed statement. “The university thanks law enforcement at all levels for their handling of this case. With Mr. Carroll’s guilty plea and the prison sentence and order of restitution imposed by the Federal District Judge, Southeastern is pleased that this matter has now been appropriately resolved.”
Carroll’s lawyer, John Liguori of Bartow, said in January that he didn’t believe Carroll deserved to be incarcerated for what he called a “classic civil dispute.”
Before joining Southeastern in 2011, Carroll was chief operating officer of Carroll Construction Company and chief executive officer of The Carroll Group in Bartow.
Gary White can be reached at gary.white@theledger.com or 863-802-7518. Follow on Twitter @garywhite13.
This article originally appeared on The Ledger: Former exec at Southeastern Univ. in Lakeland sentenced for fraud
