A 56-year-old Bucyrus business owner has pleaded guilty in federal court to a scheme that siphoned off pandemic-era stimulus funds meant to help struggling small businesses, using the money instead to pad his own finances. He is identified in local reporting as Jeffrey Skinner, who served as an accountant and treasurer at his church.
According to a statement from the U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Ohio, Skinner devised a scheme to obtain pandemic government stimulus funds meant to assist small businesses, which he instead used for his personal benefit. Ashland Source reports that Skinner sought over $1.2 million in Paycheck Protection Program and Economic Injury Disaster Loan funding, of which he fraudulently received more than $890,000.
A Scheme That Stretched Four Years
Court documents cited by the outlet place the fraudulent activity between roughly March 2020 and April 2024, meaning the scheme ran for years after the initial pandemic relief programs launched. During that stretch, Skinner allegedly funneled the loan proceeds into his own life rather than his business: he paid off his personal credit cards and bought stocks and cryptocurrency, the same report notes.
The case takes a more personal turn with Skinner's role at his church. The same outlet's report states that he served as the accountant and treasurer for his church, where he was also a board member with signature authority. He issued unauthorized checks to make small payments toward the EIDL loan.
Federal Investigators Closed In
The investigation was conducted by the IRS-Criminal Investigation Cleveland Office, according to the same report, reflecting the broader federal push to track down pandemic-era fraud years after the original relief programs ended. Skinner's guilty plea now puts the case on track toward sentencing.
Cases like Skinner's aren't isolated. The U.S. Small Business Administration's Office of Inspector General estimated in a report that the SBA disbursed more than $200 billion in potentially fraudulent loans through its COVID-19 relief programs, a staggering figure that has fueled years of federal prosecutions nationwide.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office has also examined the government's ability to catch this kind of fraud, reviewing how the SBA designed and implemented its process for detecting and referring likely fraud cases in COVID-19 EIDL and PPP lending, and identifying weaknesses in that system. Elsewhere in Northern Ohio, a Portage County man who orchestrated a financial conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic was sentenced to prison in a case announced in December 2025, underscoring that Skinner's case is part of a pattern of pandemic-fraud prosecutions moving through Ohio's federal courts.
Skinner's sentencing is scheduled for February 24, 2027, according to local reporting. The judge will determine Skinner's sentence at that hearing.
