A onetime scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California was sentenced Tuesday to 18 months in prison for submitting false data and reports to the U.S. government to defraud it out of quantum computing research funding, the Justice Department said this week.
S. Darin Kinion, 44, was sentenced in U.S. District Court for Northern California after he pleaded guilty on June 14 to submitting false data to the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Kinion was charged by information with one count of mail fraud.
IARPA gave Kinion millions of dollars in funding between 2008 and 2012 to design, build, and test experimental quantum computing components at LLNL, the Justice Department said. Instead, Kinion gave the government fraudulent data to make it appear as though he had conducted the work; specifically, he obtained funding to buy equipment to build and test components that he reported he used successfully, even though he never set up or operated the gear. The Justice Department did not elaborate on the intended purpose of the research.
Kinion also mailed nonfunctioning components to IARPA’s validation team, claiming he had mailed operational items, and altered FedEx mailing labels, falsely claiming to have mailed items prior to the time he actually did, the Justice Department said. “Further, when a scientist visited LLNL, Kinion conducted a 3-day ‘charade’ experiment in an effort to establish that his testing was legitimate,” it added.
LLNL spokeswoman Lynda Seaver said by email that Kinion began working at the lab in 2001 and was terminated in 2013 following the Department of Energy site’s investigation into his case. His work on the project in question began in 2010, she said.
“The Lab investigation was launched when it became clear there were some discrepancies in his work,” Seaver said. “The matter was eventually turned over to the Department of Justice.”
After prison Kinion will also serve three years of supervised released and must pay $3.3 million to the U.S. government in restitution. His prison sentence will begin on Jan. 26, 2017, the Justice Department said.
