A Lehigh University professor has been charged with defrauding NASA, for whom he was supposedly conducting research.
A United State District Court criminal complaint filed last Monday says that 52 year-old Yujie Ding, an electrical and computer engineering professor, used a fraudulent business registered to his wife to take advantage of research funds NASA provided to Ding and Lehigh University.
The complaint says that Ding requested an unnecessarily large budget for a proposed project with plans to keep half the money for his fake business he set up with his wife.
NASA approved Ding’s $600,000 proposal, which included $300,000 for subcontractor Lehigh University and $300,000 for small business ArkLight, through its Small Business Innovation Research program in May 2011.
The criminal complaint says that ArkLight is a company registered to Ding’s wife. It also says that ArkLight actually completed no work.
The contract that Ding proposed to Lehigh allegedly implied to the university that they would perform half the work for the project under SBIR regulations, but the criminal complaint says that the university was actually providing the resources for all the work because ArkLight was doing no work.
ArkLight did, however, put its portion of the research funds in a bank account from which Ding’s wife wrote checks to him and herself.
The complaint says that Ding kept Lehigh in the dark about his connections to ArkLight which would have gone against university policies about conflicts of interest.
In one specific instance in June 2012, Ding allegedly filed an invoice from a computer in Pennsylvania through SBIR’s electronic handbook for a payment of $70,000 which was transmitted to NASA’s system in Virginia, which investigators say qualifies this incident as wire fraud.
Court paperwork says that Ding was released on $50,000 bail and cannot leave the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. It also says that Ding cannot leave the country without approval from the United States Attorney’s Office.
Jordan Reese, the spokesperson for Lehigh University, issued the following statement on behalf of the university in response to the charges against Ding: “Lehigh University will cooperate fully with federal investigators and is currently conducting an internal investigation to determine whether there has been any violation of university policy.”
Neither Ding nor his attorney were immediately available for comment.
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