Ex-CISA Employee Billed 33-Hour Days Across Secret Contractor Jobs
The guilty plea exposes a remote-work oversight failure that raises an uncomfortable question: how many other federal cyber employees held multiple jobs during the hiring boom without detection?
TL;DR
A former CISA employee pleaded guilty to a federal false claims charge for secretly holding multiple federal contractor jobs while employed full-time at the agency, at one point billing 33-hour days across four simultaneous positions. Richeline Anisso Fung must repay nearly $250,000 for the scheme, which ran from 2021 to 2024 and went undetected by both CISA and the contractors who employed her. The case exposes a remote-work oversight gap that flourished during the federal cyber hiring boom, the kind of fact pattern that makes primes and contractors ask who on their own payroll might be doing the same thing.
The numbers are what make this one hard to look away from. In February 2022, Richeline Anisso Fung submitted timesheets claiming she worked 33 hours on four consecutive days and 32 hours on a fifth, all while employed full-time at CISA and holding three additional contractor positions supporting the Justice Department, USDA, and the Federal Highway Administration. Her reported working time exceeded 24 hours on 15 separate occasions that month alone. The math doesn't stretch; it breaks.
Fung pleaded guilty Wednesday to a federal false claims charge for a scheme that, by the Justice Department's accounting, defrauded the government of nearly $250,000 between January 2021 and August 2024. She worked at CISA from September 2016 through October 2025. During the overlapping period, she held contracting roles across at least six additional agencies: the DEA, the Departments of Energy, Justice, Transportation, and Agriculture, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Some of that work flowed through RAF Pro-Consulting, a Florida company she founded in 2020. Fung admitted the scheme was possible because every position was remote. She must repay the full amount; sentencing is set for January 20.
The remote-work blind spot
The plea doesn't disclose Fung's CISA role or describe the sensitive work she may have had access to, and that silence is its own problem. CISA's workforce ballooned during the same period Fung was moonlighting: the agency added hundreds of staff in a push to fill cyber defense roles across critical infrastructure. Remote hiring accelerated the pace but didn't accelerate the controls. Fung concealed the overlapping employment from both CISA and the contractors who held her other positions, and none of them detected it. DOJ's investigation found the fraud; no agency or contractor self-identified the problem.
A broader enforcement moment
The Fung case lands amid a conspicuous run of DOJ procurement-fraud actions. In June, a former Intelligence Community contractor pleaded guilty to accepting kickbacks on government contracts. In April, a former Air Force Master Sergeant admitted to a $37 million bid-rigging scheme targeting PACAF IT contracts. A Census Bureau program manager was sentenced in July for a kickback conspiracy. In December 2025, two Maryland IT executives pleaded guilty to defrauding the government through rigged bids and kickbacks. Fung's scheme is smaller by dollar figure, but the vulnerability it exposes cuts across every agency that stood up remote-work arrangements without corresponding employment-verification controls.
For primes and contractors, the practical takeaway is uncomfortable. If DOJ is willing to prosecute a CISA employee for double-billing across contractor roles, it's a short walk to asking why the contractors who paid her timesheets didn't catch it first. Timesheet inflation and conflict-of-interest failures have always been False Claims Act territory. What's new is the remote-work dimension: the same flexibility that let agencies hire faster also made it possible for one person to hold seven jobs and bill 33-hour days without anyone noticing. The controls that would've caught that in an office didn't exist at home, and in many places they still don't.
Published ·Deep Fathom