Agency’s audit: 221 awards of hours off

Division leader’s suspension starts

An audit of time sheets in the human-resources division of the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department uncovered 221 occurrences over a 49-month period ending in 2010 in which human-resources employees were rewarded paid time off for winning trivia contests conducted by the division head.

The occurrences collectively resulted in total time off for employees of 358.5 hours worth $5,959.97 between November 2006 and December 2010, department spokesman Randy Ort said Tuesday. The amount is based on the salaries of the people involved, Ort said.

Crystal Woods, the head of the human-resources division, was suspended for 13 days without pay, a decision the department director, Scott Bennett, made Friday, Ort said. Bennett notified Woods of his decision Monday, and she began serving the suspension Tuesday, Ort added.

The 13-day suspension would result in a loss of income to Woods that is close to the amount the contests cost taxpayers in lost work hours, Ort said. Woods draws an annual salary of $119,054, according to the Arkansas government transparency website.

Bennett ordered an audit of employee paid administrative leave within the human-resources division after Woods said in a deposition last year that she used to grant unearned paid leave to employees who won trivia contests she conducted.

Winners typically would receive an hour or two off on the day before a holiday, Woods said in her deposition.

The audit found that the average time off an employee received was 1.6 hours, Ort said Tuesday. The time off ranged from as little as 15

minutes to about half a day, he added.

In her deposition, Woods said she stopped the practice after she learned in 2010 about an audit that eventually uncovered a pattern of “inappropriate [paid] absences from work” in the department’s legal section that led to the dismissal in 2011 of the department’s chief counsel, Robert Wilson.

Wilson, who is black, sued the department, claiming the agency was racially discriminatory for suspending and firing him for granting unearned paid leave while it ignored similar conduct by other top agency officials who are white, such as Woods.

A legislative report released in 2011 showed that the department’s legal division employees were paid for 2,520 hours of work they didn’t perform over a 2½-year period. The dollar value of the lost work hours was originally estimated at about $74,000, but it was later revised down to about $20,000.

U.S. District Judge Kristine G. Baker dismissed Wilson’s lawsuit Monday because, she ruled, he offered no “direct evidence of discrimination,” failed to prove the defendants’ reasons for suspending and terminating him were a pretext for discrimination and provided no evidence that the suspension and dismissal were in retaliation for his recommendations on behalf of black employees who were discriminated against by the department.

Baker also found that Wilson was fired for misconduct detailed in an audit and a report by an outside law firm and for his failure to cooperate with an investigation into the misconduct, including skipping a meeting with Bennett and R. Madison Murphy, the Arkansas Highway Commission chairman at the time.

Ort called the timing of the judge’s ruling and Woods’ suspension coincidental and also said Woods’ misconduct didn’t rise to the level of Wilson’s.

Ort acknowledged that the time period in which Woods conducted the contest exceeded the time period covered by the audit.

The trivia game and granting winning employees time off was a custom, Woods said in the deposition, that she inherited from her predecessor and that she continued after being elevated to the head of the division in 2004. The human resources division employs about 30 people, according to Woods.

The audit only went back to November 2006 because records before that were more unreliable, Ort said. It was in November 2006 that the department adopted a code for administrative leave with pay that auditors could readily track. Still, the audit took about a year, in part because auditors had a “tremendous volume of information” to review and the lead auditor had to take some unexpected leave time, Ort said.