A staffing recruitment company in Novi abruptly closed its doors this summer, leaving past employees with what they say are missing paychecks and 401(k) contributions, plus a string of lawsuits against the CEO claiming she owes lenders millions.
InStride Staffing was a startup that opened in 2024 and specialized in recruiting workers for positions at IT and engineering businesses. Many of its own dozen or so employees worked remotely from different states, while InStride CEO Morgan Miller lived in Novi, where the company also kept an office in a building near Twelve Oaks Mall.
According to past employees, the company seemed to be under financial pressure by late last year, when they began to get late paychecks and the occasional bounced paycheck.
In early July, Miller, who is in her early 30s according to past media coverage, announced in an email to employees that she had made the difficult decision to close InStride, as "too many challenges have accumulated."
But nearly two months later, four past employees told the Detroit Free Press that they are still missing multiple paychecks and thousands of dollars of 401(k) contributions that don't appear to have made it to their 401(k) accounts.
One of the employees says he also is facing $48,000 in medical bills because, unknown to him and others at the time, InStride's employer-sponsored health insurance was terminated by its insurance company at the end of March for unpaid premiums — weeks before his wife gave birth — and he was unaware of the termination until after his family's medical expenses were incurred.
Separately, Miller is personally facing multiple lawsuits in federal and state courts from merchant cash advance lenders who claim she is on the hook for defaulted loans to various other companies she owned or controlled. Some of the lenders are alleging fraud.
Several lawsuits are still ongoing as the lenders seek default judgments because of Miller's lack of response to the allegations.
InStride is not a party to most of the lenders' lawsuits. However, last month a New York judge did enter a judgment against Miller and InStride Staffing for more than $84,000 owed to a lender, court documents show.
Three of the employees have filed wage complaints in the state of Pennsylvania, which is where they live and worked remotely for InStride. Two employees told the Free Press that they looked into hiring a lawyer, but so far haven't found one willing to take the case on a contingency basis. None of the employees had filed police reports related to missing wages and benefits.
Company, CEO respond
The Free Press reached out to Miller via email for this story. She initially agreed in an email in mid-August to an interview via Zoom with her own attorney, whom she did not identify, present. But she later canceled the interview, citing her attorney's need to appear in court for a different case. Attempts to reschedule an interview were unsuccessful.
An official InStride Staffing email account did respond to Free Press inquiries about the company and the employees' claims of missing paychecks. The person writing the responses did not identify themselves.
In a series of emails, InStride disputed that it permanently closed for business, insisting that only "a specific division" closed in early July.
But the company wouldn't identify what divisions or operations remain open, and a reporter's visit to InStride's office in late August found the door locked, the lights off and the nameplate of a different business on the wall.
InStride also disputed owing any money to past employees, and said a third-party audit found that no employees' 401(k) contributions were withheld or are missing.
Because some employees failed to return company-issued equipment, such as laptops, the cost of that equipment was deducted from their final pay, the statement said.
"It is important to distinguish between an employee alleging unpaid wages and a government agency determining that wages were unlawfully withheld," the statement said. "To date, no governmental agency has concluded that InStride violated wage laws or improperly withheld employee compensation."
As for the claim that the company's health insurance coverage lapsed due to nonpayment, resulting in an employee getting stuck with tens of thousands in medical bills for his wife and newborn, InStride said that that employee's decision to take an extended paternity leave affected his workplace benefits.
Lawsuit claims
One of the lenders that is suing company CEO Miller, as an individual, claims that Miller used a fictitious name — "Katherine Booth" — to obtain an $11.9 million advance in late 2023 for a company called L3 Tech.
That lawsuit from Round Table Financial claims that after L3 fell behind on repayments, Miller donned a wig-and-glasses disguise when appearing on a Zoom call and pretended to be "Katherine Booth," only to later indirectly admit that she wasn't "Katherine Booth." The lawsuit doesn't specify how she "indirectly" admitted to using a false identify.
“What she did is create a number of fake businesses and claim that those businesses owed one of her businesses money, and then took, in our case, about ($12 million) I think it was, and then paid back a little bit, and then the other businesses just kind of went poof," Round Table's attorney, Stuart Collis of Collis, Griffor & Hendra in Ypsilanti, told the Free Press.
Miller has not entered a formal response to that lawsuit filed in March in Oakland County Circuit Court. Court records show no lawyer as representing her.
Round Table is seeking a default judgment and triple damages totaling $30.1 million.
"We have a personal guarantee, so we can hold her personably liable," Collis said.
'Fraudulent invoices' alleged
Miller also is a defendant in an Oakland County lawsuit filed in April also in Oakland County Circuit Court, brought by another lender, Ford Global, which is located in Connecticut and not affiliated with Dearborn automaker Ford Motor Co.
The lender says it advanced $360,000 in March 2025 to a set of companies that Miller owned, in exchange for nearly $600,000 worth of anticipated future payments from businesses that were said to be those companies' customers.
The lawsuit says Miller's companies defaulted on the repayment plan. To originally get the cash advance, the suit alleged, Miller's companies presented the lender with "fraudulent invoices" from purported customers who in fact weren't customers.
To make the setup look authentic, the lawsuit claims, Miller's companies would wire money between various accounts to make it appear that customers wired the money.
Miller has yet to respond to Ford Global's lawsuit filed in April. There is no lawyer listed as representing her in the pending case.
Tough to serve
Several attorneys for lenders have described having difficulty locating Miller to officially serve her with lawsuit papers, despite the documents being sent to her business and Novi home addresses.
Outside of work, Miller has garnered positive attention in horse show publications as a horse exhibitor. So Round Table Financial's attorney said they even went so far as to try and have her served lawsuit documents at a horse show in Florida where they believed she would be.
Ford Global's attorney said they, too, have struggled to locate Miller. Miller said in an email this week that she has moved to Arizona.
“We got her company served, we believe, but we do not have her served and we don’t know her whereabouts,” said attorney Edward Gudeman in Royal Oak.
In late July, a judge in Kings County, New York, entered a default judgment of $84,305 against Miller and InStride Staffing. The judgment came in a lawsuit from a New York-based lender, CFG Merchant Solutions, filed last October that claimed InStride made a few early payments before stopping altogether.
However, InStride Staffing insisted to the Free Press in an email that the "InStride Staffing" company facing that court judgment is a different company.
"We are specifically disputing that the judgment is against our company," InStride said.
(The judgment identifies InStride Staffing by its former Novi mailing address and identifies Morgan Miller by a Novi residential address.)
Missing paychecks
In Free Press interviews with four past InStride employees, three recalled how they began receiving late paychecks by last fall and said the situation devolved from there to the occasional missed paycheck or short paycheck.
Employee Austin Sams, who worked remotely from Pennsylvania for InStride as an associate recruiter, said that in January his personal bank account was flagged for possible fraud after one of his InStride paychecks bounced due to insufficient funds.
InStride eventually made him whole for that paycheck, he said, but he is still missing four paychecks and some 401(k) contributions.
In April, Sams' wife gave birth to their first child. Only later, he said, did he learn that InStride's health insurance had been discontinued for nonpayment on March 31, which meant that his wife's and their newborn's medical expenses wouldn't be covered.
A copy of the UnitedHealthcare termination notice sent to Sams provided to the Free Press cited lack of payment as the reason for coverage cancellation.
Sams said Miller never told him that extending his paternity leave from two weeks to four would affect his health insurance benefits. Even so, he said, his wife's birth and hospital stay occurred during the initial two weeks and should have been covered.
Another former employee, AveMaria Okolo, said she is still owed $6,784 from three missing paychecks as well as some missing 401(k) contributions.
Okolo, who worked remotely for InStride from her home in Atlanta, said Miller did offer her a severance this summer of about $11,300. Okolo said she declined to sign the severance agreement because she said there were inaccurate calculations for her missing wages and she said she worried that the severance check might bounce.
“It needs to be known what happened so other people don’t find themselves in a similar place," Okolo said.
More missing paychecks
Lauren Faraone was one of InStride's earliest employees and its director of operations. Her husband, Jeremy Adams, later joined the company as an operations leader. They worked remotely from their Pennsylvania home.
Faraone told the Free Press in an interview that she took out a $20,000 personal loan this past January to help the company meet payroll.
She said she made the loan out of a deep desire for InStride to succeed and her hope the company was facing only a temporary rough patch. Miller seemed very appreciative at the time, Faraone said, and promised she would pay the loan back quickly.
“It was that or she was going to close the company, because she (Miller) didn’t know what else to do," Faraone said.
Things seemed to be going better at the company for a short period after that, Faraone said, but the interlude didn't last.
Faraone said she was never repaid for the loan and that she and her husband, together, are still missing about $45,000 in paychecks from their time at InStride. They also had just under $14,000 in 401(k) contributions disappear, she said, not counting the 4% employer match.
Faraone said she and her husband were terminated from InStride in May. The news was presented to them by a human resources person from outside the company, Faraone said, who offered a vague reason of "operational change" for why they were let go.
Faraone said she believes the real reason they were fired was that she wanted InStride to hire a forensic accountant.
In its emailed statements to the Free Press, InStride denied that Faraone ever took out a loan for the company. The company also said a "thorough audit" of the payroll found that Faraone and her husband were paid everything they were owed.
(Faraone, in response to InStride's denial, shared screen shots of bank records for her $20,000 disbursement and of a Microsoft Teams chat log that shows Miller thanked Faraone for a loan and says "your reimbursement will be a top priority.")
InStride also claims that Faraone and her husband were terminated from the company following "serious misconduct investigations." The couple denies any such misconduct.
Contact JC Reindl: 313-378-5460 or jcreindl@freepress.com. Follow him on X @jcreindl
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Lenders say CEO of failed Novi startup InStride Staffing owes millions
