Suspicions only grow as more of the twisted history of Pinellas County's version of the federal welfare-to-work program is revealed. The latest chapter: Times staff writer Michael Sandler reported that county staffers ignored a directive from county commissioners to seek an audit of the work force development program amid allegations of fraud and wasted tax dollars.
Recently obtained minutes of closed-door sessions of the Pinellas County Commission show that in January 2002, commissioners were upset with the county staff. Some commissioners said that they had asked a year earlier for a forensic audit to determine whether Lockheed Martin IMS, the private contractor hired to help people get training and enter the work force, had charged taxpayers for services never rendered.
But the audit never was done. In explaining the long delay, County Attorney Susan Churuti told commissioners that such a detailed audit would have been expensive and that if the audit found problems, the "smoking gun" could point at them because the County Commission was the fiscal agent overseeing the work force contract. Attorneys suggested a different approach: Instead of the expensive forensic audit, the county could ask Workforce Florida, a state agency, to interview a sample of Lockheed Martin clients to find out if they actually received services. The commissioners directed the staff to make that request.
More than three months later, in another closed-door session, Churuti and County Administrator Steve Spratt admitted to annoyed commissioners that the request for a sample audit never was made to Workforce Florida. "Communication confusion," Spratt said, but then he suggested a different approach altogether: A member of his own staff could do a review of the Lockheed Martin invoices.
Such determined avoidance of a thorough examination of Lockheed's performance is disturbing and suspicious, especially given all the other concerns swirling around Pinellas' work force program.
The program had been in turmoil almost from the beginning in 1999. Boards responsible for overseeing the program kept changing. Assistant County Administrator Rick Dodge got suspicious of Lockheed, and he and one of his senior assistants pushed Lockheed to justify its invoices. The assistant later committed suicide, and Dodge later was fired. Lockheed Martin IMS, which pulled out of the county contract in 2001, was bought out by ACS State and Local Solutions, which sued the county to recover almost $2-million in disputed invoices the county had not paid. Dodge also sued the county, claiming he was fired for blowing the whistle on Lockheed. The County Commission held a series of closed-door sessions, with discussions sometimes straying dangerously close to violating the Sunshine Law.
That's the history. Today, a review of paperwork by a county finance staff member has uncovered problems with Lockheed's record-keeping and management of the program, but no forensic audit has been done. Pinellas County commissioners voted last December to settle the lawsuit filed by ACS, which got two payments of around $600,000 each from the county and went away. The Florida Department of Labor is investigating Lockheed Martin/ACS' role in Pinellas after a local audit of ACS in the Miami-Dade County welfare-to-work program reportedly uncovered indications of fraud. Dodge's whistle-blower lawsuit is proceeding.
Incredibly, no one has asked the clients Lockheed Martin supposedly served in Pinellas if they received the training or jobs they needed to become productive members of the work force. Neither has anyone investigated whether Pinellas County officials did their duty as fiscal agents.
What is clear, and what ought to trouble Pinellas residents most, is that when Pinellas County government had the opportunity to plumb the depths of the work force program and discover whether the public had been defrauded, county officials chose to delay, meet outside of public view and protect themselves.
