Tracy Jones, a former senior vice-president at the Atlanta Housing Authority, has been sentenced to prison and ordered to pay restitution for a scheme to fraudulently collect Section 8 housing assistance payments for her own rental property and family members, making fraudulent applications to collect pandemic relief funds, and committing mortgage fraud when refinancing her rental property.
According to U.S. attorney Hertzberg, the charges and other information presented in court, from April 2017 to the time of her guilty plea in this case, Ms Jones served as senior vice-president over the Housing Choice Voucher Program at the Atlanta Housing Authority, overseeing one of the largest Section 8 programmes in the country.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development funds Section 8 programmes, including rental assistance payments to landlords on behalf of low-income families and individuals. Section 8 funds are limited, and there is often a long waiting list of low-income families seeking acceptance into the program.
Housing authority staff are generally prohibited from receiving Section 8 payments for their own properties, and Section 8 landlords are typically prohibited from leasing to their own family members.
Instead of upholding the integrity of the housing assistance programme, Ms Jones defrauded it by using a series of falsified forms to have her family members admitted to the Section 8 programme and then to receive Section 8 payments for them to live in her own rental house.
To conceal her identity, Ms Jones used a fake name and a shell business entity to execute housing authority documents. As a result, she improperly obtained more than $36,000 of Section 8 funds. Ms Jones then obstructed subsequent investigations by submitting a false affidavit and convincing friends to lie and present false documents on her behalf.
At the same time, Jones used her shell business and another business to collect more than $27,000 from the U.S. Small Business Administration’s COVID-19 pandemic relief programmes, falsely claiming that the businesses were functioning, had multiple employees, and received over $56,000 of gross revenues in 2019.
When the SBA denied one of Ms Jones’s applications, she appealed the denial, falsely stating, “I am truly a[n] honest business owner[.] I hear the stories how people abused the PPP loans to establish a lavish lif[e] style. That is not me.
“My business is small and is growing, but I [am] one of the legitimate and honest business that can use all the help I can. I also serve a community of low-income families in my business, renting one of my three homes to a low-income family as well as serve other owners of low-income rental properties.”
Ms Jones also committed mortgage fraud when she refinanced her Section 8 rental property, falsely claiming on her application for a $219,780 loan that the property was her primary residence, that the residence was not a rental property, and that she did not own any other property.
On Wednesday, Ms Jones, 61, of Atlanta, Georgia, was sentenced to 9 months in prison, followed by nine months of home detention and 15 months of supervised release, and was ordered to pay restitution in the amount of $65,598.80 and a fine of $63,546.
She pled guilty on February 2, 2026, to conspiracy to commit theft of government funds, wire fraud, and credit application fraud.