A remembered investigation, brings a small smile

A small smile came over my face the other day as I drove by a local accountant’s office. Not because accountants amuse me, but I was recalling how the path of this particular accountant crossed mine several years ago.

Local government beat reporting can be tedious, but with persistence and sources it can also be very rewarding. When I listed my most memorable assignments I considered putting this story on the list, but decided it was too routine to make the list.

It was one of those stories that came about because I had become familiar with my beat and had developed good sources. There was a certain amount of good luck as well. It is always better to be lucky, than good.

At the time, Lapeer County Commissioners were supposed to submit their mileage every month for reimbursement. If they were on time, a check was cut and the mileage paid and unless, or until, someone requested the mileage records, no one would ever be the wiser.

The only exception to the pay-as-the-bills-are-submitted rule was when a Commissioner (or any county employee, for that matter) let the mileage reports stack up for more than three months. Then the bills had to come before the Commissioners for final approval.

One Commissioner, the accountant, liked getting paid one lump sum check for his mileage at the end of the year. Sort of a Christmas club account. So he would wait until December, file all his mileage forms together and look forward to a $3,000-plus mileage check just in time for shopping.

So in early December, I arrived at the Commissioners meeting and picked up my meeting packet and noticed the neatly typed and printed mileage forms, all signed by the Commissioner under the penalty of perjury.

So far, it was no big deal, although I noticed the amount was quite large, $3,300 or so.
As I took my place at the press table Lenny, a county resident, one of those great citizens who comes to every meeting (and doesn’t get paid for it like a reporter) walked up to me and asked if I had looked over the Commissioner’s expense report.

Lenny, who also served as a planning commissioner in a local township, directed my attention to the November mileage sheet. He pointed to line in the mileage report that showed the Commissioner/accountant had billed for mileage to the planning commission meeting in Lenny’s township.

“He wasn’t there,” Lenny said. “I was there for the whole meeting and he was never there.”
OK, the guy made a mistake. Big deal, he’ll get a couple bucks he didn’t deserve. But then Lenny and I started looking through all the pages and the commissioner said he had been to every monthly planning commission meeting in the township. Lenny couldn’t remember ever seeing the commissioner at a meeting.

Now, I’m curious. The meeting goes on, the commissioners gave preliminary approval to pay the mileage and my mind starts racing. Within two hours I put in Freedom of Information requests to every village and township on the commissioner’s mileage sheet for minutes of meetings that the commissioner said he attended.

Grabbing my phone, I called some of the other venues that the commissioner had charged mileage for and suddenly there were more “no shows.”

I started collecting documents and traveling through the county interviewing clerks at townships who couldn’t remember ever seeing the commissioner, even though he had billed for every meeting they had during the year.

In all, I could confirm that the commissioner overbilled the county by at least $1,200 and that’s just what I could prove in documents. Where there was doubt, I didn’t count that mileage against the commissioner. Only those trips I knew he hadn’t made were counted as overbills.

So now it was time to get things in order. Before calling the commissioner, I wanted to get some county folks on the record about mileage issues before they found out what I was working on.

So I called the County Board President and simply asked him what his reaction would be to one of the commissioners overbilling for expenses. He was definitive, if it was a mistake, they should immediately reimburse the county, if deliberate, they should resign.

With all my pre-interviews done, it was time to call the commissioner in question.
At first, he denied any overbilling or mistakes. Then when I went line-by-line, including some instances where he was supposedly at two different places at the same time and date, he asked if he could have some time to review the records and get back to me.

I told him to take the time to review it, but that I wouldn’t wait forever. He called back the next day and said, yes, he had found a few instances where he may have mistakenly billed for meetings and would reimburse the county. He continued to deny the more than 100 instances of false mileage filing that I had found for that one year.

The reason this happened, he said, was that he put all the dates of the various meetings in his computer and a program that he had developed apparently “forgot” to delete the meetings he had scheduled, but didn’t attend. I pointed out that he had signed the forms as true “under the penalty of perjury.”

At the next meeting, the commissioner withdrew his mileage request until he could do a complete audit. I’m sure Christmas was a little thin at his house that year.

My first story ran on the front page, but I had already put in a new FOIA request for mileage reports for all the commissioners and for every year that the accountant/commissioner had been on the Board.

A review of the commissioner’s previous years’ filings found more of the same, thousands of dollars of mileage not driven. Too many frankly, to be any kind of mistake.

A review of all the commissioners’ mileage reports showed that unlike county employees who were not allowed to bill for mileage from their homes to work, commissioners were billing mileage from their homes to meetings at the county building. Commissioners were already being paid $17,000 a year for a part-time job.

The commissioner/accountant steadfastly refused to resign over the mileage “mistake,” but did eventually reimburse the county. He was soundly defeated in his re-election bid a few months later, a defeat many people said was a result of my stories.

The county reviewed their mileage policies and commissioners decided they should no longer bill for mileage from their homes to the county complex, and that all mileage reports would be reviewed every month and that no mileage reports could be submitted or paid after a period of two months.

In the end, an independent investigation by a prosecutor in another county did not lead to charges, although the local prosecutor believed they should have.

All of that came from an offhand comment from a source at a boring meeting. There was nothing outstanding or difficult about this investigation. Any average reporter could have, and likely would have, done the same thing I did.

But when beat reporters are missing in action, who will do this kind of plodding work? Some will say bloggers, but what impact will that have. The oversight of local government is an important role that the newspapers have filled.

I’m trying to envision who will do this kind of work in the future. I know I’m not interested in doing it for free. And what will a politician care if some blogger calls and demands answers. Like it or not, there’s a certain impact when you tell a politician you are calling from a known media entity.

When I call from “Grandma’s Recess” blog, I don’t think the politician will be as responsive, or as worried, as my accountant/commissioner was during the mileage investigation.

So pardon me for a little smile as drove by the accountant’s office.

Oh, and thanks for great sources and citizens like Lenny.