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WorkNet official fired over resume
By LISA GREENE, Times Staff Writer Pinellas County employee Kelly Brady portrayed herself as a whistleblower, putting her job in jeopardy while trying to save the county millions. But county officials painted a different picture Monday when they fired Brady, the chief financial officer at WorkNet Pinellas, the county's welfare and job placement agency. County officials said Brady falsified her resume by claiming to have a degree from Arizona State University. Brady could not be reached for comment Monday evening. She is the second high-level manager fired this month. Former assistant county administrator Rick Dodge, who once supervised WorkNet and other departments, was fired Aug. 9. Brady met Monday with county officials and didn't explain the degree claim, "other than to imply that someone had falsified her record," said Gay Lancaster, assistant county administrator. The discovery prompted County Administrator Steve Spratt to order a review of the degrees of all his employees who are required to have a college degree. Spratt has 2,700 employees under him, but he did not know how many would be included in the check. On Monday, Spratt also disputed claims Brady made in an unusual memo to him last week. In that memo, Brady said she has been telling county officials since January that the county should perform a detailed audit of the accounts run by the company under contract to provide welfare services. Brady has called for a forensic audit, which would look for fraud, of the work done by the former contractor, Lockheed Martin IMS. The company, now ACS State & Local Solutions Inc., sued Pinellas in December and the two are now locked in a legal fight. "Kelly Brady has not "blown a whistle' on anything not already known by her superiors, evaluated by experts, debated and then acted upon by appropriate decision makers," Spratt said in his first public statement on the issue. Spratt, other county officials and the outside auditor who performed an earlier audit for Pinellas all said that Brady never told them that the county should perform such an audit until she wrote the memo last week. "You could have knocked me over with a feather," said Bonnie Moore, WorkNet's executive director. "I don't recall her ever making that comment to me," said Chip Jones, who was involved in KPMG's audit of the Lockheed Martin IMS accounts. The audit was highly critical of Lockheed Martin. But Jones said he didn't see anything indicating that a forensic audit is needed. Dodge also was a strong proponent of a forensic audit, and some county commissioners questioned the timing of Brady's memo so soon after Dodge's firing. But Spratt said he didn't know whether there was a link. Officials in the Arizona State registrar's office did not immediately return calls late Monday. But county officials had documents from them stating that the university had no record for Brady. A photocopied Arizona State diploma in Brady's personnel file contains a typo, misspelling the word "does" as "dos." County department heads are supposed to verify degrees, Spratt said. Moore didn't do that because Brady and several other employees joined WorkNet after working for a similar agency when the agency was restructured, county officials said. After Brady wrote the memo, Moore placed her on paid leave, saying she was insubordinate for writing a memo directly to Spratt without telling Moore. Spratt said county officials began to discuss transferring Brady, and that the diploma problem was discovered when county staffers began checking her background as part of a possible transfer.
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From the Times North Pinellas desks Letters |
