A former head of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives at Facebook and Nike was sentenced to five years in prison this week for a brazen fraud scheme she ran while working at the companies.
Barbara Furlow-Smiles pleaded guilty in December to stealing more than $5 million from the two big companies, though the vast majority was taken while she worked for Facebook from 2017 to 2021. She used the stolen money to fund a “lifestyle of luxury”. prosecutors said.
“I screwed up big time,” Furlow-Smiles admitted in a letter to the judge in her case.
Furlow-Smiles said she had a lifelong commitment to being a voice for the disenfranchised, but acknowledged that her actions “added fuel to the fire of disengagement and attack on DEI efforts.”
Exploiting his access to the company's credit cards at Facebook, which is now called Meta, Furlow-Smiles paid people for services they did not perform for the company and then made those people pay him back.
She involved dozens of people in her scheme, prosecutors said, including “relatives, ex-interns from a previous job, babysitters, a stylist and her college tutor.”
At times, Furlow-Smiles would have Facebook pay third parties directly for personal goods or services, including $10,000 for specialized portraits and $18,000 for her son's preschool tuition. He would then submit false reports about the work people had done for the company.
She stole about $4.9 million from Facebook as part of the scheme, prosecutors said.
After Furlow-Smiles was fired from Facebook, she continued a similar scheme at Nike, where she worked from 2021 to 2023. At Nike, Furlow-Smiles stole more than $100,000.
Furlow-Smiles' lawyer, Phillip Hamilton, had asked the court not to put her behind bars.
In a sentencing memorandum, Hamilton argued that her client became trapped in Facebook's “move fast and break things” culture and that she was far from the only person who exploited the company's expenses for her own benefit.
“Barbara…quickly learned that her coworkers were friends with vendors and trusted these vendors to do certain things, which included offering bribes for recommending business to them on Facebook. It was the norm,” Hamilton alleged in the memo.
The number of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion positions like those Furlow-Smiles holds skyrocketed in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd, as many companies were forced to account for racial disparities in hiring or workplace issues. .
But by the time Furlow-Smiles was arrested in December, the positions were falling out of favor. DEI initiatives became a frequent target of Republican politicians, and when layoffs hit the tech sector, the positions were often among those cut first.
