Former World Learning HR executive to repay $160,000 after USAID fraud guilty plea

Carleena Graham, 59, formerly the vice president of human resources for the NGO World Learning, entered a guilty plea for stealing approximately $425,000 from the charity, much of it funded by USAID. She fabricated vendor invoices and used the organization’s credit cards to pay third-party vendors, creating a scheme that diverted about $272,500 of taxpayer money. In March 2024 she received four years of probation for a wire-fraud charge and was ordered to repay $425,000 in restitution and barred from federal contracts for three years.

Last month she settled a separate civil action with the Department of Justice, agreeing to pay $160,000, which ends the USAID Office of Inspector General’s probe. The incident underscores warnings from the USAID OIG about weak controls that allow grant-receiving NGOs to conceal fraud, a concern raised in earlier reports about wasteful spending in the agency.