New York City Special Education Teacher Collected 3 Months of Sick Pay While Being Incarcerated

According to The New York Post, a special education teacher conned her ignorant superiors at the city’s Department of Education into giving her three months of paid sick leave while she was already serving a federal prison sentence for tax fraud and student stiffening.

The special commissioner for city schools discovered that Marina Golfo, a 49-year-old speech therapist, received $24,367 in compensation while housed in a cell at the Alderson federal prison camp for women in West Virginia.

Golfo and seven other employees of the Early Intervention Program, which assists children with developmental disabilities and is governed by the Department of Health, got accused of fraud by Brooklyn prosecutors in October 2018.

The Long Island resident Marina Golfo got charged with submitting fictitious invoices and treatment records for more than 1,500 therapy sessions she never performed to extort $156,000 from the government over three years. The homes of children or caregivers should host many of those sessions.

According to court records, she admitted to healthcare fraud in July 2021 and got given a three-month prison term as well as an order to pay back all of the money she had received. But she strangely continued to be paid by the DOE.

Golfo filled out an online form for paid sick leave and submitted it to her DOE managers a few weeks after beginning work at the Clink in September. She enclosed a note from her doctor advising her to stay at home because she was too sick to visit the office.

According to court documents, Golfo also requested “compassion release” from prison and court officials due to health risks from COVID-19 and the requirement of a caregiver for her elderly parents.

On October 6, U.S. District Judge Kiyo A. Matsumoto rejected her request, stating that neither her parents’ financial situation nor her medical condition called for a lighter sentence.

On November 1, the audacious educator requested that her sick leave should get extended until December 1, two days after her sentence ended.

Surprisingly, the city granted the request despite not knowing that one of their employees was a prisoner. Overall, while being incarcerated, she has kept $47,469 of her $97,469 yearly salary.

However, the DOE was initially well aware of her criminal case, which was made public in 2018 by the US Attorney’s Office and the city’s Department of Investigations. According to SCI and a letter from a former coworker, the DOE even relocated Golfo to a Bronx Special Education Committee office a week after she was charged in federal court in Brooklyn and placed her in a rubber room while she awaited trial.

Although Golfo’s arrest in 2018 got widely reported, DOE Human Resources informed SCI investigators that it was unknown whether she requested time off from prison because she never informed the organization or her managers of her conviction.

Golfo told SCI investigators she didn’t know she violated the DOE’s sick leave rules and claimed she didn’t think her whereabouts mattered because she wasn’t in the office because of her illness. According to court records, she had herpes zoster complications.

In December 2022, SCI said it received a tip about Golfo’s misuse of sick pay. The DOE finally fired them on January 31st, about a month before SCI presented its findings to School Chancellor David Banks on March 6th.

Special Commissioner Anastasia Coleman suggested that the DOE demand that Golfo returns the salary she received while incarcerated. She also stated that she should get banned from working with the DOE in the future, The New Post reports.

Government watchdog Ken Girardin criticized the DOE for failing to investigate an employee’s incarceration and for allowing Golfo to raise money for her salary on top of that.