Congress outlines ticketing scam and other financial misdeeds allegedly committed by Commanders and owner Dan Snyder

• The House Committee on Oversight and Reform sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission with pertinent details from its investigation into the Washington Commanders.
• The committee outlined several alleged financial misdeeds committed by team executives, including owner Dan Snyder.

The Congressional investigation into the Washington Commanders has produced some damning allegations against team executives, including owner Daniel Snyder.

In a letter to the Federal Trade Commission, the U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee wrote that Snyder and other top executives "may have engaged in a troubling, long-running, and potentially unlawful pattern of financial conduct that victimized thousands of team fans and the National Football League."

The letter outlines two types of financial mismanagement that Snyder is accused of overseeing for years at the helm of the organization: one that spurned fans out of as much as $5 million of their own money, and another that allegedly picked the pockets of the NFL itself.

The Commanders didn't immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

The Commanders are accused of obstructing fans from collecting deposits the team owed them

As a part of the investigation, the committee spoke with former Washington sales executive Jason Friedman, who had been with the organization for more than two decades until leaving the team in October 2020.

According to Friedman, in 1997 the team began requiring fans to pay a one-time, refundable deposit down to secure a multi-year lease on premium seats at FedEx Field. These deposits were supposed to be refunded to fans within 30 days of the lease's expiration.

By 2000, deposits were no longer required to secure seats, but the letter alleges that the Commanders worked to obfuscate the fact that fans might be entitled to recoup the money they had handed over to the team years ago.

Per Friedman:

"[M]any of them [customers] forgot about it. In many cases, with corporate accounts, the attention name on the account would change over time. So the person who entered into the lease and agreed to pay the security deposit would be different from the person who was managing the account when the lease expired ten years later, and the new point of contact wouldn't know to ask for the security deposit.

"One of the other reasons the team was able to do this is because people would pass tickets down in their family. So, you know, a mother passes the tickets down to her daughter, and as she does that, doesn't tell her that there's a security deposit on the account. And then when the daughter decides not to renew the tickets, she doesn't know to ask for her security deposit back. And, again, the team just keeps it and doesn't go out of their way to try and refund the money."

According to Friedman, the Commanders had retained "approximately $5 million" in unreturned security deposits from its own fans, as of 2016.

Some of those funds, Friedman said, were converted into revenue the team could actually use, a process that Commanders higher-ups dubbed "juicing."

Friedman said he was instructed by Snyder, as well as then-COO Mitch Gershman, to identify accounts that were unlikely to ask for their security deposit to be returned, return the deposit within the team's system, and then convert the money into "juice."

"The money would then be allocated to a similar license fee, handling fee, interest fee. It would get converted into something where, A, we didn't have to share it with the league, and B, there was no outstanding obligation related to it," Friedman said, per the letter.

The Commanders "juicing" system allegedly helped the team conceal revenue from the NFL

Season ticket holders weren't the only party allegedly getting skimped by the Commanders juicing their financials — the NFL itself, and the other teams in the league that would benefit from the shared revenue agreements, were also shut out of some of their deserved money.

As Friedman told the committee, the Commanders would sometimes charge a price for bulk-purchased tickets that was greater than the price the tickets were listed at in the team's system. They could then claim the difference between the two prices as revenue coming from a different event.

The process was illustrated by an email sent from Friedman to former team CFO Stephen Choi:

"(Stephen – can you reply all with processing guidance? This is the bulk club sro [standing room only] order where I am charging $55 per ticket, but the tickets are priced at $44 in the system. There are a total of 14,760 game tickets being sold here with $11 per ticket of juice = $162,360)"

Choi replied that the "juice" of $162,360 would be applied to the Navy-Notre Dame game that FedEx Field was also hosting. Because the revenue was now not associated with the sale of NFL tickets, it was no longer subject to the league's revenue-sharing policy.

"Each time it happened related to this type of activity, it was substantial, hundreds of thousands of dollars usually," Friedman told the committee. "How many times it happened, I would estimate that this exact type of activity happened probably at least a dozen times."

Choi did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

The Congressional investigation into Snyder and the Commanders leaves the NFL with plenty of questions to answer

This is far from the first time that Snyder and the Commanders have been under the microscope, with the franchise constantly under pressure to change its previous name and recently having dealt with now two sexual misconduct investigations. The first was led by former federal prosecutor Beth Wilkinson, who was hired by Snyder in 2020 before the investigation was taken over by the NFL.

Despite the NFL completing its investigation, no report was produced, with the league going as far as to withhold documents from the Congressional committee as it underwent its own investigation.

"To date, the NFL has refused to provide the Committee with the full findings of Ms. Wilkinson's investigation, and both the NFL and the Commanders have taken steps to withhold key documents and information from the Committee," the letter said.

According to the Congressional investigation, former Director of Marketing and Client Relations Rachel Engleson affirmed in a letter: "It was known and/or rumored in the office that there was 'moving around' of money regarding tickets." Engleson also told the committee that she had informed Wilkinson's team of that fact in 2020.

But no public accusations of financial misdeeds came out of Wilkinson's investigation, whose conclusions largely revolved around workplace culture.

Wilkinson did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

Snyder is still currently under another NFL investigation, this one headed by former SEC chair Mary Jo White, over an allegation of sexual misconduct. An NFL spokesperson indicated to ESPN's Adam Schefter that White will also look into the financial allegations raised by the Committee: "We continue to cooperate with the Oversight Committee and have provided more than 210,000 pages of documents. The NFL has engaged former SEC chair Mary Jo White to review the serious matters raised by the committee."