Teachers should make more money. Even principals should make more money. But they probably shouldn’t do it by secretly holding two jobs with overlapping hours at the same time. The Washington, DC Attorney General’s office recently announced a settlement under its District False Claims Act (the DC equivalent of a state False Claims Act) against a former assistant principal who collected a salary for that role in DC while simultaneously getting paid for working in person as a principal in Rhode Island. As you can imagine, the jobs had very similar hours. The scheme was possible in 2020 because DC schools were fully remote.

The former assistant principal, Michael Redmond, only got away with the double-dipping from July to November 2020. Then, DC Public Schools caught him. But during that time, he had submitted timesheets and collected $45,828 in salary from his DC job.

In 2021, DC’s Office of Government Ethics fined Mr. Redmond $10,000 for violating personnel rules against outside employment and improperly using government time and resources. He was also required to repay the salary he fraudulently collected for the months that he was really working in Rhode Island, not doing his work in DC. He never paid the fine or returned the ill-gotten gains.

So in June 2023, the DC Office of the Attorney General brought a False Claims Act case against Mr. Redmond. Since the District False Claims Act, like its federal equivalent, allows for treble damages, this was bad news for Mr. Redmond. (In fact, it was even more serious than getting called into the principal’s office.) After the DC Superior Court entered a judgment against him in August 2025, Mr. Redmond found himself on the hook for a total payment of $259,294 to the District.

The case is a creative application of a local False Claims Act in the era of remote work. We may see more cases like this one in situations where state government employees violate their contracts by taking on concurrent, conflicting jobs. The possibilities aren’t limited to school workers; anyone who is a state employee and defrauds their employer could find themselves violating their state’s False Claims Act by fraudulently collecting pay for hours they did not work.