BATON ROUGE - The Department of Justice reports a Baker school owner and CEO was indicted in connection with a federal financial aid scheme.

57-year-old Alden Hall, of Baton Rouge, is charged with four counts of theft of government funds, one count of fraudulently obtaining financial assistance funds, one count of engaging in monetary transactions in property derived from specified unlawful activity and one count of aggravated identity theft.

The DoJ says Hall, the owner and Chief Executive Officer of Alden’s School of Cosmetology and Alden’s School of Barbering in Baker, engaged in a scheme to steal Title IV funds, specifically Pell Grant funds, from the Department of Education.

In the scheme, Hall caused misrepresentations to be submitted to the DOED, including that certain students were enrolled in Pell Grant-approved programs of instruction when Hall knew they were actually in programs that did not qualify for the financial assistance.

The indictment goes on to say that Hall forged and falsified documents for the purpose of qualifying more students for Pell Grants. Investigators noted that Hall misrepresented to the DOED the number of hours that certain students had attended class and how many students were at the school. It is believed that Hall and her businesses fraudulently received more than $100,000 in federal funds during the alleged scheme.