Probe: Former official did personal work on state time
A former state higher education official improperly used her state email account, desk phone and computers to manage her personal business on state time, investigators unexpectedly discovered.
The probe of Lauren McGarity, a lawyer and one-time director of special projects at the Department of Higher Education, has been referred by the office of Inspector General Randall J. Meyer to city and county prosecutors for consideration of potential criminal charges.
McGarity spent more than 100 hours of work time on personal calls involving her business and her son’s restaurant while also apparently handling hundreds of personal and business emails on state-issued computers, the investigation found.
McGarity also improperly used her state position and email account to work with the staff of the Ohio Senate in an unsuccessful bid to change law to permit her to open a charter school for inmates in the Marion Correctional Institution, Meyer’s staff established. The school never opened, although McGarity received a $50,000 federal charter-school grant from state K-12 officials for 2009-10.
She formerly owned and operated Win-Win Inc., which held a series of contracts with the state prisons agency to provide re-entry services for inmates soon to be released from Marion Correctional Institution. The company’s last contract in 2014-15, before it folded, totaled $102,900.
The inspector general also discovered that McGinty failed to accurately report her work hours on more than 300 occasions and claimed regular and compensatorypay during eight days of an 11-day vacation. She was overpaid nearly $3,000 for not reporting mandatory time off for lunch on many days, the report said.
McGarity, 57, who was paid nearly $49,000 last year, was fired from the higher education department last year. She now appears to operate a law office in Columbus. She denied wrongdoing.
The inspector general’s office dug into McGarity’s company after it came to its attention while conducting separate investigations involving the prisons department in 2015.
The office recommended that the Department of Higher Education enact a secondary employment policy and more carefully account for employee work time while requiring supervisor approval of employee time sheets. It also called for increased ethics training on the use of state resources and work hours.
“We will be carefully reviewing the findings and take the necessary steps to improve procedures and policies within the agency,” said spokesman Jeff Robinson.
The Franklin County Municipal Court building will reopen Friday morning after being closed since Wednesday because of a waterline break that flooded public elevators and other areas.
The building was evacuated about 2:30 p.m. Wednesday after the break occurred behind the wall of a sixth-floor women’s restroom, said Joe Lombardi, Columbus’ director of finance and management. Water entered the lobby areas outside the elevators on the fourth, fifth and sixth floors and poured down the elevator shafts.
Crews have corrected electrical issues caused by the water and dried out the elevators, Lombardi said.
“There will still be some moisture, but most of it has been taken care of,” he said.
No damage estimate was immediately available.
Since the waterline rupture, the building at 375 S. High St. has been open only to law-enforcement personnel and court employees, Municipal Court Clerk Lori Tyack said.
The only exceptions were people paying bail or posting bond at the clerk’s office, which is open 24 hours a day. Those individuals were ushered by security to a staircase to reach the second floor, she said.