UC BERKELEY Ex-employee told to lie on taxes, lawsuit alleges

BERKELEY >> A former UC Berkeley employee who worked closely with outgoing Chancellor Nicholas Dirks’s family is suing the school and the regents who oversee it.

In a lawsuit filed Monday in Alameda County Superior Court, Alice McNeil alleges that she performed personal jobs for Dirks’ family and then was pushed out after refusing to lie about it on tax forms.

McNeil began working as manager of University House, where Dirks and his wife, associate professor Janaki Bakhle, lived in 2013. The suit alleges that she was asked to take their son to the dentist, fill out medical forms for his boarding school, and have their personal car serviced.

She initially reported these jobs on her tax forms before the thenchief of staff allegedly told her to resubmit the forms indicating she’d spent no time performing such personal services.

Afraid of losing her job, McNeil says she followed the instruction but continued to perform personal jobs for Dirks’ family. In 2014, McNeil was promoted and alleges the family indicated they were happy with her work.

According to the suit, after a new chief of staff was hired, McNeil attempted to accurately report the hours she spent performing personal services but was again reprimanded. Later, according to the suit, she was asked to sign a new form that cut the hours she reported and was laid off and given a short-term contract position that ended in January 2016.

“Although the lay-off notice indicated that the reason she was let go from University House was ‘lack of work,’ this explanation is false and pretextual,” reads the suit, a claim Berkeley denies.

The suit comes, according to McNeil, after multiple attempts to report retaliation to Berkeley and the UC regents.

“It is the case that questions were raised about the accuracy of personal services reports that Ms. McNeil submitted for herself and other University House staff after she failed to submit them in a timely fashion and then informed management that her reported numbers were based on rough estimates and not on any actual record-keeping,” UC Berkeley said in a statement to the Bay Area News Group. “Because of the campus’s commitment to accuracy, the reports had to be corrected based on interviews with staff about their specific activities. Staff signed off on these corrected reports, and the Chancellor and his wife paid taxes based on them.”

“The University intends to mount a vigorous and successful defense of its actions,” the statement continues.

The UC Office of the President referred questions to UC Berkeley.