Misrepresented Marital Status to Increase Disability Benefit

Greensboro, N.C. – United States Attorney Ripley Rand announced that Carl Gene SWINDELL, age 62, of Mayodan, North Carolina, was sentenced May 20, 2011, in federal court for fraudulently obtaining government funds.
Senior United States District Judge N. Carlton Tilley, Jr., sentenced SWINDELL to six months in prison followed by six months home confinement and three years of supervised release. SWINDELL was also ordered to pay $49,751.88 in restitution to the Social Security Administration (“SSA”).

SWINDELL began receiving Supplemental Security Income (“SSI”) disability benefits in July 2001 and advised the SSA throughout the time he received benefits that he had never been married. Although he admitted to the SSA that he lived with a woman named Donna Parker and denied being married, SWINDELL and Parker had in fact been married since 1976. Donna Parker began receiving SSI disability payments in June 2002. She also claimed she was not, and never had been, married. The disability benefits of both SWINDELL and Parker would have been reduced if they had admitted that they were married.

Parker died in September 2009, and, on October 13, 2009, SWINDELL went to the Reidsville, North Carolina SSA office to file for widower’s benefits. To support the application, he produced a marriage certificate indicating that he and Parker had been married on November 6, 1976. SWINDELL confirmed that they had lived together throughout their marriage until Parker’s death.

SWINDELL was overpaid $49,751.88 in SSI disability benefits over an eight-year period as a result of fraudulently representing to SSA that he was not married. The case was investigated by agents of the Social Security Administration-Office of the Inspector General and prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Terri-Lei O’Malley.

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