Fake mileage and a new computer: USU employee charged with fraud for more than $25k in ‘illegitimate’ expenses

As a Utah State University employee, Angela Aurora Rodriguez’s job was to visit high schools across New Mexico and recruit students to attend USU, particularly its southern Utah campuses.

But the principals at some of the schools Rodriguez was assigned to visit told investigators they had no idea who she was and had never met her. Some said their schools hadn’t been asked to host a USU recruiter in years.

A Utah special agent alleges that Rodriguez, 46, never actually went to most of the schools on the list she was given when hired by USU’s Blanding campus in southern Utah. Instead, she allegedly used more than $25,000 in state funds on personal expenses and to travel around the state and country for trips unrelated to her job — while at the same time logging fake mileage for reimbursement.

Rodriguez was charged this week with three felony counts for theft and deception, misusing public money and communications fraud for nearly a year of unauthorized purchases during her brief employment.

It’s the latest case involving a USU employee in a string of similar misspending issues over the past several years, including another staff member at USU Eastern in Price who was paid for more than two years with little evidence he completed any work.

Investigators say Rodriguez charged a university credit card — referred to as a purchasing card or P-card — to cover the airfare and other expenses for an eight-day trip to Illinois with no work-related reason to travel there, according to court documents; she allegedly later told her manager that it was an accident that she charged the card for that.

The documents say Rodriguez also used her P-card to buy a new computer, even though USU had already provided her with one for work. She also allegedly told her supervisor, according to charging documents, that the “Apple computer was a personal purchase” and she intended to reimburse the school for the expense.

The P-card charges added up to $5,233 in expenses not allowed by the university.

A probable cause statement from the special agent with the Utah attorney general’s office who investigated the case also says that Rodriguez requested and received reimbursement for mileage totaling $19,891 for trips that were “determined to be illegitimate.”

That included expenses for trips outside of her assigned recruiting area, travel during non-school hours and for schools that investigators determined she never visited.

“There were multiple discrepancies between the locations of P-card purchases and Rodriguez’s reported travel location and miles traveled,” the charging documents state.

On “more than one occasion,” the document says, Rodriguez used her P-card for a hotel in one part of New Mexico when she reported that she was visiting schools in other parts of the state.

All of the expenses were made between July 20, 2023, and April 1, 2024, the documents state. She was terminated on April 1, according to a university spokesperson, when the school learned about the “unusual spending.”

“Utah State University values and expects integrity and honesty and has procedures in place to address concerns when they arise,” the school said in a statement.

Rodriguez’s address is listed in court documents as being in Carlsbad, New Mexico, but the probable cause statement says it appears she had moved and officers do not know where she currently lives. The Salt Lake Tribune could not find a way to contact her.

She has been issued a summons, though, to go to the San Juan County Sheriff’s Department to be booked and immediately released on the charges. And her first court appearance is set for Dec. 1 at 10 a.m.

Utah’s public employee salary website shows Rodriguez was paid $25,142 in wages for 2024, with $11,021 in benefits. She also received $2,910 in “additional allowances.” It’s unclear how much of those allowances overlapped with the expenses she is now facing charges on.

USU’s board of trustees recently approved updates to its spending policies for all employees, to cap expenses and add more parameters around what is allowed for spending and travel — and to conduct more real-time checks on spending.

The school also created an entirely new policy on presidential spending — prompted by reporting from The Tribune on former President Elizabeth “Betsy” Cantwell’s more than $660,000 in expenses during her 18 months in office.

That included Cantwell using university funds to buy two new cars, as well as a $28,300 climate-controlled golf cart to drive around campus. She also spent $750 on a bidet for her office, among other lavish furnishings and a costly remodel to the space in the Old Main building.

The new policy will require all presidential spending be reviewed four times a year, with most large purchases also requiring the trustees’ approval.

The changes were fast-tracked in time for the appointment of newly announced leader Brad Mortensen, who took the helm earlier this month.

USU said in July 2024 that it was going to tighten its accounting policies — which had not been updated since 1999 — in light of Tribune reporting then on an employee at the university’s Price campus. It also promised to look for possible fraud at all satellite campuses.

In that earlier case, a damning audit found that an employee at the Price campus had been failing to show up to work for two years — but was still being paid.

Administrators were aware of the situation with Warren Tyler Agner, the audit says, and allowed it to continue. That’s because they were friends with the staffer, including one associate department head who lived with him, and all covered for Agner so he could keep getting a paycheck, according to the findings.

Also, in September 2023, a USU professor in the College of Natural Resources pleaded guilty to siphoning more than $11,800 in fraudulent reimbursement claims between May 2018 and January 2022.