Chesterfield woman pleads guilty to defrauding numerous COVID-19 programs and tax charges

Date: Feb. 5, 2026

Contact: [email protected]

Richmond, VA - A Chesterfield woman pled guilty today to making false statements to steal from multiple COVID-19 relief programs.

According to court documents, from approximately May 12, 2020, through at least March 18, 2021, Sheila C. Bynum-Coleman filed for and received at least nine fraudulent COVID-19 Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans totaling over $225,000 on behalf of eight different businesses she and her husband, Rashad H. Coleman, 48, purportedly operated. To obtain these PPP loans, Bynum-Coleman made numerous false certifications, including that each business had significant annual sales and revenue. Bynum-Coleman inflated and manufactured annual sales and revenue figures to inflate the amount of PPP funds for which the business could qualify. Additionally, with each PPP application, Bynum-Coleman fabricated Internal Revenue Service (IRS) income tax return documents to falsely support the inflated business sales and revenue figures.

For instance, though Bynum-Coleman submitted excerpts of a 2020 income tax return as part of multiple PPP loan applications, neither Bynum-Coleman nor her husband filed any income tax returns in 2020. Bynum-Coleman and Coleman also pled guilty to failing to file 2020 income tax returns.

Though Bynum-Coleman represented to financial institutions in PPP applications that she and her husband were operating numerous businesses in 2020, Bynum-Coleman represented to the Virginia Employment Commission (VEC) that she was unemployed from March 15, 2020, through February 13, 2021, to obtain pandemic unemployment benefits. Bynum-Coleman falsely certified to the VEC that she had not applied for or received PPP funds for the same time period she was seeking pandemic unemployment benefits. Bynum-Coleman made false statements to the U.S. Small Business Administration to defraud a separate COVID-19 program, the Emergency Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) Program.

Bynum-Coleman routinely spent fraudulently obtained PPP funds on paying down her home loan, luxury clothing, paying down credit card bills, and other personal spending. Moreover, on May 29, 2020, about a week after receiving $62,500 in PPP loans, Bynum-Coleman transferred $10,000 of fraudulently obtained PPP funds into a bank account in the name of "Friends of Sheila for Delegate," an account for Bynum-Coleman's political campaign for the Virginia House of Delegates.

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Avi Panth and Thomas A. Garnett prosecuted the case.

The Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation Washington D.C. Field Office and the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General Mid-Atlantic Region investigated the case.

IRS Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) is the law enforcement arm of the IRS, responsible for conducting financial crime investigations, including tax fraud, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, public corruption, healthcare fraud, identity theft and more. IRS-CI special agents are the only federal law enforcement agents with investigative jurisdiction over violations of the Internal Revenue Code, obtaining a 90% federal conviction rate. The agency has 19 field offices located across the U.S. and 14 attaché posts abroad.