Taking unearned paid time off at the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department extended beyond the agency's legal department, according to depositions taken in a lawsuit filed by the agency's former top lawyer.
Scott Bennett, the department director, has ordered an audit of employee paid administrative leave within his agency's human resources division after its top official said in a deposition 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, Crystal Woods said in her deposition.
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, is suing 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. It is an allegation the agency vigorously disputes.
Nonetheless, Bennett instructed the department's internal auditor, Judy Robertson, to investigate the leave practices within the human resources division to determine how many hours "were gifted," said Randy Ort, a department spokesman.
It was Robertson's audit of the leave practices in Wilson's office that led to an audit by the Legislative Audit Division and a legislative hearing that Wilson's attorneys said amounted to a "political lynching" for their client.
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.
"It was usually, you know, an hour or two before quitting time she would, it might be something like guess how many marbles are in this jar and [whoever's] guess is closest to the correct answer might get to leave early," Woods said in the deposition, taken in March. "So after [her predecessor] retired and I took over I continued the practice."
One of Wilson's attorneys, Austin Porter Jr. of Little Rock, called Bennett's decision to audit Woods' division "too little, too late."
"He's known about Ms. Woods' practices for some time," Porter said. "They are trying to do damage control."
Bennett, in a separate deposition he gave to Wilson's attorneys, said he only learned of the trivia game on Feb. 28, a week before his March 6 deposition.
"The practice isn't going on anymore and I'm not sure when it was terminated but that was the first I heard of it," said Bennett, who wasn't elevated to the top of the agency until 2011.
Though the depositions were taken in March, they are not publicly available. But Wilson's attorneys used excerpts from the depositions in their briefs they filed this summer to oppose the department's attempts to get Wilson's lawsuit dismissed.
U.S. District Judge Kristine Baker has yet to act on the department's dismissal request. The lawsuit, if it isn't dismissed, is scheduled for a nonjury trial Feb. 17.
In pushing for the dismissal, lawyers for the Highway Department -- Michael Moore and Khayyam Eddings of the Little Rock firm of Friday, Eldredge & Clark -- said Wilson's and Woods' practices of giving paid time off weren't the same and therefore couldn't be compared.
Wilson removed, or directed to be removed, certification of his employees' time sheets, they said. Woods, by comparison, recorded the time off as paid administrative leave, they said.
"Unlike Plaintiff Wilson, Woods never removed or directed the removal of a certification from the time sheets of her divisions's employees," they wrote. "Woods never directed or otherwise permitted employees under her supervision to fill out time sheets which [indicated] that they had worked at time when they had not."
According to Legislative Audit, at the time, department employees were required to submit time sheets for the hours they worked and sign the time sheets, which included the following statement: "I hereby certify that the total time worked for the day is true and correct, and acknowledge that providing false information may be grounds for immediate dismissal."
Wilson, the top lawyer for the department for 23 years, was placed on administrative leave Sept. 9, 2011, the same day he defended himself before the Legislative Joint Auditing Committee over the inappropriate absence allegations involving his staff.
A Legislative Audit Division report released in July 2011 found that the department's legal division employees were paid for 2,520 hours of work that they didn't perform over a 21/2-year period. The dollar value of the lost work hours was originally estimated at $74,000 but was later revised to about $20,000.
Wilson told the committee that he began allowing his employees to take a half day off with pay every third Friday, on a rotating basis, in 1990, as a way to allow them to compensate for extra hours they worked. Legislative auditors said that if the employees had worked longer hours to warrant compensatory leave, it wasn't documented.
But it wasn't uncommon for other division heads to regularly grant unearned paid leave, according to the lawsuit.
"Despite the fact that the highway department knew about other Caucasian division heads doing the same thing that Mr. Wilson had done, with the exception that Mr. Wilson was told to do what he was doing, Mr. Wilson was singled out for his race," Wilson's lawyers said in court papers.
Part of Wilson's defense is that top agency officials approved his practice of allowing employees paid time off, partly in response to criticism from people in his department who said he watched their time too closely.
Robertson, the department's chief auditor, didn't see much difference in what Wilson and Woods did, saying in her deposition that even if time off was coded as "paid administrative leave," it still was unearned.
"So no matter what coding you give it ... it would not make it appropriate, is that correct?" Robertson was asked in the deposition.
"That's correct," she replied.
The department eventually adopted an electronic time-keeping system for its 3,600 employees, partly as a response to the audit.
"It was a factor, but it wasn't the only factor," Ort said.
The department spent about $2.7 million for the system, which covered the hardware and software as well as support, he said.
The agency spent an additional $1.1 million to upgrade its computer equipment and network to handle the new time-keeping system and make it functional in its districts across the state. But that work also gave the department better connectivity, efficiency and accuracy for other agency activities, Ort said.
Metro on 10/20/2014