Former UCSF employee sentenced for stealing tuition payments to fund personal expenses
By Web Staff
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SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX) — A San Francisco woman was sentenced Thursday to 20 months in prison and ordered to pay at least $1.5 million in restitution for stealing students’ tuition payments at the University of California, San Francisco nursing school for more than five years.
Sandra Eileen Le, 55, pleaded guilty in November to three counts of wire fraud committed while she was an academic program officer for the UCSF School of Nursing’s post-master’s and special studies certificate programs, federal prosecutors said.
Le directed students to make tuition checks payable her, or to a merchandiser she purchased from, or to leave the checks’ payee line blank, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
The students’ tuition checks were funneled to her personal bank accounts or joint accounts she shared with associates, to pay for luxury items, gambling, home improvement, and other personal expenses.
“Le disguised and concealed her misconduct by generating false records of payments and student enrollment for her supervisors at the university,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
From November 2013 to March 2019, Le diverted nearly 300 tuition checks, totaling more than $1.5 million, prosecutors said. Investigators began looking into discrepancies while Le took a leave of absence in May 2019.
School officials weren’t able to reconcile tuition revenues with enrollment in the programs that Le administered. Then, while she was on leave, a student gave Le’s replacement a tuition check written out to Le, explaining that the payment was per Le’s instructions, prosecutors said.
On Thursday, U.S. District Judge William Orrick ordered Le to surrender by May 10, to start serving her 20‑month prison term, and after that, she is ordered to serve a three-year period of supervised release.
Restitution was set to be at least $1,536,089.64, with the exact amount to be ordered after a further hearing.
The case was prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office Northern District following an investigation by the FBI and the UCSF Police Department.
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