A former director of finance at New York University pleaded guilty Monday to charges she defrauded the university out of $3.4 million that was meant to fund businesses in the city owned by women and minority groups.
Cindy Tappe, 57, struck a plea deal with prosecutors Monday that will allow her to avoid time behind bars, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced. Instead, she’ll be forced to pay back $663,209 in restitution and spend five years on probation.
Tappe will be formally sentenced on April 16. Had she been convicted at trial, she faced up to 25 years in a New York state prison.
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“Her fraudulent actions not only threatened to affect the quality of education for students with disabilities and multilingual students, but denied our city’s minority and women owned business enterprises a chance to fairly compete for funding,” Bragg said in a statement.
Prosecutors said Tappe used the stolen funds on lavish purchases for herself, including a whopping $600,000 renovation to her home in Westport, Connecticut, where she installed an $80,000 swimming pool.
Authorities said Tappe began stealing in 2012, when she was funneling money from the universities’ coffers to two shell companies she created and portrayed as being businesses that were eligible to receive funds from state education grants. She also drafted false invoices for three subcontractors who were paid without doing any work, the district attorney’s office said.
Tappe’s shady dealings were noticed by the university in 2018, and Tappe left her position overseeing NYU’s Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and Transformation of Schools shortly after she was confronted.
Tappe’s office was given $23 million worth of grants between 2011 and 2018, prosecutors said. That total meant Tappe defrauded the university out of nearly 15 percent of its taxpayer-funded grants that were meant to support marginalized businesses in New York City.
In a statement, university spokesperson John Beckman told the Associated Press that NYU is “deeply disappointed that an employee abused the trust we placed in her in this way.”
“She stole from everyone—the taxpayer, the university, the people the Metro Center is supposed to help,” he said. “NYU is pleased to have been able to assist in stopping this misdirection of taxpayer money, and glad that the case has been brought to a close.”
