PHOENIX — A man has been indicted on charges of forging receipts to collect money through his child's Empowerment Scholarship Account, Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell announced.
Shawn Hantke is accused of submitting three forged receipts to the Arizona Department of Education for musical instruments between December 2024 and August 2025. In total, prosecutors say Hantke was reimbursed more than $4,000.
According to MCAO, each receipt also contained a shipping tracking number for a delivery made before the order was alleged to have been placed.
The counts refer to falsified Guitar Center receipts, including one for an acoustic guitar worth $1,675.54 and another for an acoustic guitar worth $1,242.07.
A grand jury indicted Hantke on one count of Fraudulent Schemes and Artifices, a Class 2 felony, and three counts of Forgery, a Class 4 felony.
John Ward, executive director of the Empowerment Scholarship Account Program, said the case surfaced through the program's routine review process.
"One of the things that we take very seriously in the ESA program is fraud and abuse," Ward said.
Ward explained that a dedicated team reviews thousands of transactions each year on a risk basis, and this transaction was one of those selected for audit. When reviewers spotted markers suggesting some of the receipts may have been forged, the account was suspended immediately so no additional money could be spent.
The case was then sent to an investigator who worked with the education service provider the receipts were supposedly from before the matter was referred to the Maricopa County Attorney's Office.
"Just for reference, we get over today over 3 million orders coming in annually in this ESA program. We have 110,000 students who use it," Ward said.
Because of that volume, Ward says reviewing every transaction individually is impossible. Instead, the program uses a host of risk factors to identify transactions that warrant a manual review. Once reviewers flagged one concerning transaction, they went back and audited all of the transactions associated with the account, which allowed them to identify all of the questionable transactions submitted to the program.
Ward declined to share specifics about what made the receipts appear suspicious, saying only that his staff is trained to look for markers that may indicate receipts are not authentic.
The role of auto-processing
The transactions Hantke was indicted on fell under the $2,000 threshold, Ward said. He drew a distinction between auto-approved and auto-processed transactions.
"The specific transactions that this account holder was indicted on were transactions that were under the $2000 threshold, and they're not auto-approved. They're only auto-processed," Ward said.
Ward said that even though the transactions were auto-processed, they still came up in the program's risk-based audit pool, which allowed reviewers to find them. He said the student's account remains suspended.
A combination of staff, AI and investigators
Ward said the program relies on a combination of tools to hold bad actors accountable: staff who review questionable transactions, artificial intelligence that helps identify them, and an investigator who determines whether there is wrongdoing or a false alarm.
"So the combination of those three things really allows us to hold bad actors accountable," Ward said.
Ward said the program conducted a statistical analysis of misspending and fraud last spring, a step he said had not been taken in the program's 15-year history.
"Only 2% of dollars spent in this program were spent for unallowable items, and of that 2%, only 0.3% were transactions that we would consider egregious misspending that might rise to the level that we're talking about here," Ward said.
Ward distinguished between innocent misspending and egregious misspending. He said typical misspending might involve items that are technically allowable but purchased in a luxury version, while egregious misspending involves items or services that were never allowable in the program.
"If you buy airline tickets to fly somewhere, that's egregious misspending," Ward said.
Ward said the program is committed to protecting the students it serves.
"We have 110,000 students on this program. This program is serving them so well we are not going to allow a small group of bad actors to ruin it for everybody," Ward said.
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