 |
Former phone chief estimates 25 percent of 9-1-1 calls failed
|
“I had
a $5 million annual budget, but my department never had any money.”
- John Foddrill
San
Antonio – Though his attorneys have long advised him to stay
silent, a whistleblower came forward with explosive evidence passed
over in a public integrity trial 6 years ago, and it involves the
kind of hard-edged facts that can cause police officers and firemen
to lose their certification, lawyers their licenses to practice, and
accountants their privileges to certify the audits they perform.
Former
Telecommunications Manager John Foddrill says his former boss, San
Antonio's Municipal Integrity Manager, and a man who now serves as a
Deputy City manager all lied about a 30-year program of “massive
long-term theft and fraud” involving the $5.2 million “variable”
account designated to pay the city's phone bill.
Foddrill
is the plaintiff in a federal suit against his former employer
alleging mistreatment over his efforts to reveal fraudulent
accounting practices in the city's Information Technology budget and
payment process. He alleges a long-term campaign of harassment that
cost him his job, a lot of mental anguish, terroristic threats and
police allegations that proved false.
He has a
smoking gun in the form of a long-secret e-mail that serves as a
Rosetta Stone that he says translates exactly how city managers
concealed a method of accounting which has enabled the misapplication
of funds and misallocation of payments for anything and practically
everything besides that for which they are dedicated –
telecommunications service and equipment
“The
illegal procedure diagram shows the secret, criminal process where
millions of dollars a year of non-telephone, non-grant related
documents/invoices were knowingly processed by corrupt IT
employees/officials in an effort to gain access to upwards of $5.2
million a year for the past three decades, was shown on audits and
statements that the money was used to pay for monthly telephone
costs, but this was a lie and accounting fraud...”
Accountants
who sign off on audits submitted to credit rating bureaus such as
Moody's, bond investors, and prepare reports for government grant
administrators have been operating in collusion, according to
Foddrill.
“When
the fraudulent audits are submitted to grantors and bond investors,
it becomes grant and bond fraud as state/federal agencies and
municipal bond investors are being defrauded and are never told the
massive long-term theft and fraud. The SEC opened up a tracking case
in May of this year after we reported the bond fraud to them.”
In a
pair of 2005 e-mails between Municipal Integrity Manager Virginia Ann
Quinn and Hugh Miller, Foddrill revealed in information packets
distributed to social media writers late this past week, Ms. Quinn
“lies when she states that no laws were broken...” He further
alleges that a February Whistleblower trial lost traction when she
“lied under oath in court...to hide the crimes.”
The
e-mail's addressee, City Information Technology Director Hugh Miller,
“helped coach city witnesses,” and Peter Zanoni, who is now a
Deputy City Manager, “lied under oath at my trial as the City's
Budget Director to hide the crimes.”
Those
crimes, according to Foddrill, are concealed in a complicated system
of paying for telephone services and equipment known as “the
variable.”
In the
November 29, 2005 exchange of e-mail memos, an IT department employee
named Michael Armstrong thanked Ms. Quinn for her assistance in
deciphering what for him was an incomprehensible jumble:
“As a
relative newcomer, the existence of variable accounts came as a
surprise to me. We will be working with staff and Management and
budget to make sure ITSD is operated in a sound, businesslike manner.
The information will be useful to me as I consider what should be the
appropriate methodology for funding IT activities in the City. I
agree that our entire billing system is in disarray, and has been for
some time. We are working to bring that under control but I'm not
sure that internal billing as it exists in ITSD provides much value
for the City.”
So, what
is the “variable”?
Ms.
Quinn explained that, though the investigation based on complaints
from Foddrill had been concluded, the case file closed due to “lack
of evidence/unfounded,” she needed to “close the loop with
you...and communicate our finding on one particular area of concern.”
In
interviews with current and former staff, she explained,
investigators had discovered that “the telephone 'variable' charge
that was established approximately 25 years ago” had been a part of
the ITSD budget process ever since.
In those
days, each department paid its own phone bill, but when Ma Bell
started complaining about the confusion, “ITSD instituted the
'variable' because they didn't know how much the telephone costs
would be in any given month.”
Over
time, four variables were established, the largest among them the
phone account.
Ms.
Quinn memorandized, “We established that the telephone variable has
been used to pay for items completely unrelated to City telephones.
Those things included: The ITSD trophy case, training for ITSD
personnel, remodeling at ITSD, numerous department-specific
purchases, and date equipment for the City network. If, during the
course of the year, any single department incurred a large unbudgeted
cost item, it was likely that the variable would be tapped so that
the cost of this item could be spread across City departments.
Because City departments were essentially powerless to protest the
charge, the practice has continued. The largely unsupervised and
unregulated billing of departments across the City under the guise of
the telephone 'variable' for the past 25 years has resulted in the
department having been billed for an untold amount of goods and
services from which their department received no benefit or for costs
that rightfully should have been borne by ITSD.”
That's
putting it mildly, according to Foddrill. By his calculations, he has
charted the way untold millions upon millions of dollars have been
siphoned off the variable to pay for “illegal costs added to
variable.”
They
include “costs not associated with grants; costs not associated
with telephones; contracts not approved by city council; IG services
company time sheets/extra hours; purchases not approved/not in
budget/secret; credit extended for secret/non-approved
purchases/money.”
To
complicate matters, he has pointed out to the SEC and other
government hounds, investors who rely on fraudulent reports turned
over to credit rating agencies get ripped off by getting paid a much
smaller rate on tax-free muni bonds; grant auditors are fooled into
paying for a lot of things not covered by the terms of the grant, and
taxpayers take it in the shorts for outright subversion of a
carefully orchestrated budget process promulgated by city budget
regulation 6.12, state laws, and federal regulations.
Foddrill
included a complain naming namest to the State Board of Accountancy and enclosed
copies to all major accounting firms in the area, put in a jingle to
the FBI, and has sent all his material to every major media and
social media outlet in the region.
No comments:
Post a Comment