Montgomery County’s inspector general’s office is probing whether a large number of public safety employees were taking taxpayer-funded training courses while being paid to be on duty, including some classes being investigated for fraud, The Examiner has learned.
One official said most of the employees being investigated were police officers.
County employees are prohibited from taking courses through the tuition assistance program while on duty, and are supposed to sign a form acknowledging that rule when applying for the program.
“They are on their own time, they are not on county time,” Office of Human Resources Director Joseph Adler said.
Some of the employees under scrutiny are believed to have taken training classes that are at the center of an ongoing county fraud investigation, said officials who declined to be quoted by name. Police officers and others allegedly attended classes where they could buy sniper rifles and expensive handguns subsidized by county taxpayers.
Inspector General Thomas Dagley told a County Council panel last week that he will release a preliminary report of his investigation shortly.
The allegations that employees were on duty while taking classes adds another dimension into what’s become a complex inquiry into the county’s tuition assistance program, which was recently suspended over questions that program was being abused.
The tuition program came under fire in July after Sheriff Raymond Kight told county officials that the program may have been misused by training companies to offer hundreds of public safety employees discounted guns.
And, as The Examiner first reported, the county approved a number of questionable classes, including “hot yoga” and a glass-fusing art class.
The program was designed to give county employees an opportunity to pursue a degree or training that would help them at their current or future county job.
And county officials have also indicated that they are examining conflict-of-interest issues related to the program. Several hundreds of thousands of county money went to training companies that either employed county employees or were owned by them.
Besides the inspector general’s office, the county attorney, the sheriff’s office, and the County Council are all investigating the tuition program.
The allegations of police officers drawing illicit pay comes two years after at least 10 police officers were charged with a somewhat similar offense. The county found that officers had “doubled dipped” and improperly charged a real estate firm $200,000 for security work performed while they were actually on duty.
