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The Salt Lake County District Attorney's Office has launched a criminal investigation into county employees who may have failed to disclose that they supplemented their county-paid college tuition with outside financial aid.
The "double-dipping" probe targets rank-and-file workers and exempt employees that could total nearly half the county's 4,000-member work force, The Salt Lake Tribune has learned.
It follows the release of an explosive audit that chronicles the abuses of the county's Tuition Assistance Program during the past 13 years.
"The program itself is deficient in checks and balances," Deputy District Attorney Valerie Wilde said Monday. "We'll be looking at whether there was fraud."
The mayor's office ordered the investigation, which requires the DA to individually screen roughly 2,800 applications submitted over the past four years. Older case files are exempt because of the statute of limitations.
"Our fear is that the audit was just the tip of the iceberg," said Doug Willmore, the county's chief administrative officer.
Since 1992, the county paid 75 percent of college tuition for thousands of employees as long as they maintained a C average. But after receiving the money in their regular paychecks, hundreds dropped the courses and pocketed the cash, according to the audit. Many also have been delinquent repaying the interest-free money.
Willmore, who calls the county's tuition practice "the only advancement program I've ever heard of," estimates the loss to taxpayers near $100,000.
In response, the mayor's office has revamped the tuition program to reimburse employees after they complete the classes, as recommended by the auditor. That goes into effect April 30.
Meantime, county Personnel Director Felix McGowan says he is not opposed to the district attorney's probe.
"We will be happy to share all our records with them," he said, noting nothing in the audit indicated criminal behavior. "But that's totally their call."
McGowan acknowledges "better controls" should have been in place and says the department was "real liberal" with employees.
Consider:
* On six separate occasions, the tuition coordinator - the employee controlling the tuition account who was not named in the audit - approved her own applications for more than $2,800. Grades for the classes were never submitted, the report said.
* Some employees were paid twice for the same class.
* Handwritten "IOU's" were discovered in tuition files.
The audit also reveals three appointed officials had more than $3,500 in tuition debt verbally forgiven by former Mayor Nancy Workman - a move she denied on Monday.
"I was not aware of any appointed person taking any courses," Workman said. "If they did, I would not let that be excused."
Each year, the county doled out $350,000 in tuition assistance for an average of 700 applicants. The volume placed the county at a $2.1 million risk per year - a number that eventually got the auditors' attention.
New Mayor Peter Corroon praised the probe and, in a written statement, said a thorough investigation by the DA is "the next necessary step."
Wilde, the deputy attorney, notes each employee that requests county money must sign a form promising full disclosure of outside tuition assistance. Reviewing each file for "double-dipping," she says, will be cumbersome but doable.
"I simply can't say what we'll find until we look."
But Willmore says it also was clear a number of employees went to school on county time without permission.
''That's certainly a 'fireable' offense,'' he said. "But someone falsifying a timecard: that's criminal."
Over the past four years, Wilde says two employees have been fired for failing to disclose other tuition sources. In each case, the county department director, not the district attorney, makes the call. Findings may not be known until this summer or beyond.
The tuition audit was launched late last year when an employee leaked information about the abuse to the auditor's office, The Tribune has learned.
At least one county employee, who has used the program properly, is surprised problems were not discovered sooner.
"I always thought it was kind of funky," Michele Archuletta said, referring to the tuition-assistance policy.
"I thought [the county] would be on top of it."
More online
l For background on the new audit of Salt Lake County's college tuition programs, go to http://www.sltrib.com