Bryan Schwartz Law is in the midst of a month-long jury trial on behalf of our client, whistleblower Denise Winters, against her employer, the County of Solano - an exurban/rural County located between the San Francisco Bay Area and Sacramento.
The following lead story by Jess Sullivan was published today in the Daily Republic newspaper, in Solano County.
Trial under way for whistle-blower employee suing county
FAIRFIELD — A jury trial got under way this week for a Solano County employee who sued the county claiming she is the victim of retaliation and harassment for blowing the whistle on her boss’ massive amount of questionable paid overtime.
Denise Winters was an office assistant who was responsible for time sheets for her small group of coworkers including her supervisor within the county’s Department of Information Technology.
Winters was troubled that her supervisor, Sherrie Filbert, was racking up lots and lots of overtime during the 2007 and 2008 fiscal year.
Filbert had more than 1,100 hours of overtime and worked almost exclusively at her home on evenings and weekends. Filbert, a county employee of nearly 30 years, was racking up 20, 30 and sometimes 40 hours of overtime weekly, according to court records.
The overtime cost taxpayers more than $41,000.
Winters reported the overtime to the County Auditor Controller’s Office in 2008. Simona Padilla-Scholtens, the auditor-controller, looked at overtime and quickly turned the matter over to the District Attorney’s Office because of the possibility that criminal fraud had been committed. No charges were ever filed after the investigation.
Filbert was put on paid administrative leave for six months while county staff tried to figure out what she had done. Ultimately, Filbert was given a two-week suspension for dishonesty. Then she went back to her old job, which included supervising Winters.
Winters claims she then began to suffer harassment and retaliation in the workplace. Within a few months, Winters’ name was put on a layoff list and in spite of her seniority, she was laid off. She was the only person in her office who was laid off. But she landed another job with the county, with less pay, working in the First 5 program.
Winters sued the county in 2010.
During the first week of testimony, jurors learned that Filbert’s boss, Russ Hansen, and his boss, Ira Rosenthal, had signed off on the overtime week after week until Winters reported the dubious overtime to the Auditor Controller’s Office.
Rosenthal said in an email that the overtime had been appropriate to which another county department head responded saying “The Easter Bunny is real, too.”
Padilla-Scholtens testified that Hansen and Rosenthal had not been paying attention to the overtime Filbert had been running up. Hansen and Rosenthal also said the overtime was not approved in advance and that the overtime was mostly for a project that had no defined scope and with no defined time frame.
That same year the Auditor Controller’s Office checked on all the overtime being paid to more than 1,400 county employees. The bulk of that overtime went to law enforcement and jail guards, making Filbert stand out. Filbert had the second-highest amount of overtime among all county employees. Documents showing which county employee racked up even more overtime have been redacted.
Filbert’s overtime was for a project she took on at her own initiative. Filbert decided to try to reconcile and untangle very old accounts of receivable invoices for equipment managed by the technology department, much of it used by other county departments.
Filbert’s time sheets reflect that she worked every single day for three months, frequently from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. Most weekends she worked 12 hours on both Saturday and Sunday. She did the work at home without a county computer and without a link to the county’s computer network, according to Winters’ attorney.
Eventually the Auditor Controller’s Office determined that the project Filbert undertook could have been done in 40 to 100 hours, not in the more than 1,100 hours. They took over the project and concluded it shortly after Filbert was put on administrative leave.
The attorney representing the county, Carolee Kilduff, said Filbert had taken on the enriching project for partly personal reasons. Kilduff said the that Filbert found the project was “fun.”
“It was her recreation,” Kilduff told jurors, likening the project to doing a jigsaw puzzle.
Kilduff concedes the oversight of Filbert by Hansen and Rosenthal was “lax” and that there “should have been better communication” about Filbert’s project with her bosses.
Kilduff told jurors that Rosenthal’s decision to lay off Winters had nothing to do her reporting Filbert’s overtime.
The trial is scheduled to resume Monday.
http://www.dailyrepublic.com/news/topstories/trial-under-way-for-whistle-blower-county-employee-suing-county/
Winters deserves a medal on top of a judgment for exposing blatant government waste at a time when taxpayers are getting squeezed for revenues while being deprived of services.
ReplyDeleteI'm a government employee, and on days when I felt sluggish and didn't give my best effort, I would work overtime and not claim it. Public service is a duty and an honor, not an entitlement and not a source of amusement.
I don't even understand why supervisors earning over $100K deserve overtime. They should be on salary, working as required. Compensatory time and modest bonuses are often appropriate in such cases.
If Filbert had been employed for 30 years, she must be getting pretty close to retirement. I'd check her contract to see whether overtime would help her to spike her "high three" years for retirement pay. That would compound the theft from the taxpayers far beyond the overtime pay.
Since Ms. Filbert worked in IT, I wonder if she was working on a software project that could be sold. If she's on government time when she develops it, the intellectual property likely should belong to the government. Employees can take knowledge and experience with them, but not IP. The software might have benefited the county, but if she retained the copyright, then there's a problem. The fact that she was working on the pet project at home on her personal computer makes me think Ms. Filbert was trying to have her cake and eat it too.
Good luck with your case.