Plea Expected In Fraud Case Tied To Church Minister

88.5 WFDD - Public Radio For The Piedmont | By Paul Garber

Published May 9, 2019 at 7:16 AM EDT

A member of a secretive church in North Carolina is expected to enter a plea connected to an unemployment fraud investigation.

Diane McKinny is scheduled for a plea hearing Friday in federal court. She is a member of Word of Faith Fellowship in Spindale. Her employer, Kent Covington was a minister there.

Prosecutors allege that Covington's business laid off employees in 2008 so they could collect unemployment benefits, but they continued to work at the company, with government money replacing their salaries.

Prosecutors say Covington used his position as a church leader to coerce employees to comply.

He was sentenced last month to almost three years in prison on a charge of conspiracy to commit mail fraud.

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Paul Garber

Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.

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Plea Expected In Fraud Case Tied To Church Minister

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