Former Quality Assurance Manager of WECO Repair Station Sentenced for Aircraft Parts Fraud
On September 28, 2015, Michael Dennis Maupin, 63, of Arbuckle, California, was sentenced in U.S. District Court, Sacramento, California, related to an aircraft parts fraud scheme. He was sentenced to 12 months' probation and ordered to pay a fine of $2,500. He pleaded guilty in August 2012 to charges related to submitting an aviation quality assurance manual containing false documents to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
Between October 2006 and February 2008, Maupin, former quality assurance manager for WECO Aerospace Systems, Inc. (WECO) located in Lincoln, California, conspired with others, to conceal, facts about WECO's fraudulent repairs from customers and the FAA, to include a fraudulent WECO Quality Assurance Manual.
WECO was an FAA-certified repair business with facilities in Lincoln and Burbank, California. According to court documents, the FAA permitted WECO to repair certain types of aircraft parts, including starter generators and converters. These parts were used on various types of aircraft, including small helicopters used by tour companies and law enforcement agencies. However, WECO employees regularly failed to follow FAA regulations while repairing and overhauling the aircraft parts. In many cases, WECO did not even have equipment capable of performing the required testing on the parts. WECO employees at both locations nonetheless falsely certified that repairs had been performed and passed testing in accordance with FAA standards when returning parts to customer.
We conducted this investigation jointly with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Defense Criminal Investigative Service, U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division, U.S. Department of Homeland Security-Office of Inspector General with significant assistance from the FAA.