RICHLAND, WA – A Richland contractor and its owner will pay $1.1 million and serve one year of probation after pleading guilty to federal charges of COVID-19 economic relief loan fraud.

BNL Technical Services and its Tennessee owner, Wilson Pershing Stevenson III, obtained over $493,000 from the Paycheck Protection Program, meant to help struggling businesses retain employees during the pandemic. The company employed subcontractors at the Hanford nuclear site, but those workers continued to receive payment from the Department of Energy throughout the pandemic, even when they stayed at home, according to prosecutors.

Stevenson used the money to pay off personal debts, court records show. He then obtained loan forgiveness by falsely claiming he paid staff salaries with it.

Federal prosecutors in Eastern Washington launched a COVID-19 fraud “strike force” in 2022 and have continued to indict businesses for abusing generous pandemic-era aid programs. But the scale of theft far surpasses what prosecutors are able to charge, as Cascade PBS reported in 2023. The government lost more than $200 billion to fraud during the pandemic, according to an estimate from the Small Business Administration’s Office of the Inspector General.