The Sullivan battle against waste, fraud and abuse

Posted 8/21/12

The last four years at the Sullivan County Legislature have been truly interesting to watch. The legislature that took office in January 2012 included six new members out of a total of nine—the …

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The Sullivan battle against waste, fraud and abuse

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The last four years at the Sullivan County Legislature have been truly interesting to watch. The legislature that took office in January 2012 included six new members out of a total of nine—the same situation, incidentally, that the new legislature faces in 2016.

The 2012 legislature faced a $5 million budget gap, and the lingering, crippling effects of the Great Recession. Against this backdrop, in 2012, the legislature launched a campaign to root out “waste, fraud and abuse” from the Sullivan County Division of Family Services (DFS) and its clients.

As the chair of the Health and Family Services Committee, legislator Cindy Gieger played a significant role in that effort, as well as pushing many other reforms, such as reducing the number of homeless people living in motels.

With Randy Parker, the new commissioner of the DFS, at the helm, the battle against waste, fraud and abuse took off at a breathtaking pace. By July of 2014, 64 arrests had been made, and a seemingly endless stream of press releases came from various police departments detailing welfare fraud arrests. Four of the arrests were of DSF employees for what Parker’s lawyer would later write in a press release “creating fictitious or non-entitled recipients or vendors.”

Those four arrests eventually lead to guilty pleas, and it is therefore hard to argue that significant problems did not exist in DFS. Still, almost inevitably with that kind of crackdown, animosity toward Gieger and Parker began to grow among some members of the county workforce. More than 40 complaints were lodged against Parker by employees. Within a few months, Parker went from being seen as a hero who had helped save the county large amounts of money, to a villain who mistreated employees and withheld services from people who needed and deserved them. Still, the legislature voted five to four in the summer of 2014 to block the county manager from spending $175,000 to investigate Parker.

When DFS botched the Home Energy Assistance Program (HEAP) in the brutally cold fall of 2014, however, it became fairly clear that Parker’s days were numbered— although in the end, he was not fired for mistreating employees or the public, but reportedly for improperly spending money on a DFS event.

In what appears to be a related issue, at least to some of us on the outside looking in, ethics complaints were lodged against Gieger by two prominent county employees after Gieger sought information about specific county contracts. When those employees withdrew their complaints, new complaints were filed against Gieger by the ethics board itself and by legislator Kathy LaBuda. Gieger was accused, among other things, of releasing confidential information, which she said was not confidential. In any case, Gieger decided not to run for office again.

The string of welfare fraud arrests evaporated, the elections came and went, and Gieger never got the information she was seeking about the contract, and was banned by the county manager from speaking to county employees. At the final legislative meeting of the current legislature, on December 17, Gieger accused the ethics board of not following the rules. She said the board took six months to make a determination on her case, when it should have been done within 60 days. She said all of the complaints against her had been dropped. LaBuda said, instead, that there was insufficient information to move forward with the complaints.

Legislator Kitty Vetter made a motion that the ethics board be “suspended” until such time as the members could receive formal training. Members of the county legal team said that was not a legitimate thing to do, because to change the local law that created the ethics board would require a public hearing, which was not possible at this late date.

The resolution was amended to one recommending that the new legislature take a look at the current ethics law and consider, perhaps in consultation with the members of the ethics board, whether the law should be amended. The vote passed by the same five to four split that blocked the county manager from spending $175,000 to investigate Parker in the summer of 2014.

After all of this, it is possible to believe that all of the current legislators wanted to do the right thing most of the time. But it is also possible to believe that there was at least the appearance of political motivation in the way Gieger was treated. Let’s hope that for the next four years, following the election of six new members (again), there is a clearer unanimity of purpose in the legislature with regard to the elimination of waste, fraud and abuse.

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