Federal jury convicts Texas business owner of defrauding the City of San Antonio by overcharging $500K in janitorial services
SAN ANTONIO — After an eight-day jury trial, a South Texas businessman was convicted Wednesday of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and wire fraud.
This guilty verdict was announced by U.S. Attorney John F. Bash, Western District of Texas. This case was investigated by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) with cooperation from the City of San Antonio.
Geoffrey Comstock, 54, owner and operator of the Frio Nevado Corporation, was convicted Dec. 13 on one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and six substantive counts of wire fraud.
“Comstock took advantage of the level of good faith and fair dealing in our financial system for his own personal gain,” said Special Agent in Charge Shane Folden of HSI San Antonio. “This case clearly demonstrated the company was defrauding the city by overbilling hundreds of thousands of dollars in fake hours at the expense of taxpayers.”
According to court documents, the trial revealed that from 2002 to 2016, Frio Nevado had a contract to provide janitorial services to the City of San Antonio at the Alamodome on a daily basis and for special events. Between June 2014 and January 2016, Comstock implemented a scheme to submit fraudulent invoices to the City of San Antonio that inflated the number of man hours of janitorial work performed at the Alamodome. A contract review in 2016 by the City of San Antonio Financial Department revealed that in July 2015, to justify the previously submitted false invoices, Comstock began preparing — or directed other employees to prepare and submit — timesheets that did not accurately reflect the names of employees, number of employees, or number of man hours expended. Based upon those fraudulent invoices, the City of San Antonio overpaid Frio Nevado by more than $500,000. The jury acquitted Comstocks’s former billing coordinator, 58-year-old Anna Becerra, of all charges.
At sentencing, Comstock faces up to 20 years in federal prison on each charge. Sentencing has not yet been scheduled.
Assistant U.S. Attorneys Gregory Surovic and Bud Paulissen, Western District of Texas, are prosecuting this case.
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