Kansas hired a felon to manage $100 million. An audit says that fits with a sloppy hiring system
Takeaways
- The Department of Commerce hired a felon with a history of financial mismanagement. That person oversaw COVID-19 grant money.
- Commerce said they were told they couldn’t run criminal background checks.
- A state audit said commerce could have done more to prevent risky hires.
The Kansas Department of Commerce doesn’t run criminal background checks on nearly any of its prospective employees. That’s one explanation of how the agency hired a felon with a history of financial crimes to handle over $100 million in American Rescue Plan Act money.
Former Commerce employee Jonathan Clayton is suspected of embezzling public funds. Clayton has since died. He previously worked in Pennsylvania, where he pled guilty to forgery, theft and conspiracy to commit theft in 2018.
Despite that history, Clayton was hired at the Kansas Department of Commerce and eventually promoted to oversee the Building a Stronger Economy grant. Clayton later left the agency and worked as the interim city clerk in Peabody, Kansas.
He went missing in the summer, and while he was missing, an email claiming to be from him was sent to the media and state officials saying that Lt. Gov. David Toland and Clayton altered scores of grant applications to funnel money to certain projects.
The state denied these claims.
That prompted multiple audits. One audit published this month found flaws in how the agency hires workers.
The audit found that the agency hasn’t done any criminal background checks on staff, except for the boxing commissioner. That job has a specific requirement for the check in state law. The Department of Commerce said it does check applicants’ references, searches their social media accounts and Googles candidates before hiring them.
But the audit of the agency’s hiring practice can’t determine if the agency is even doing that.
It found that reference checks weren’t available on three of five employee files that were reviewed. The agency is also supposed to keep those files during the employee’s tenure plus three years after their final day on the job. Commerce only keeps these records for three years after someone is hired.
Bob North, chief counsel at the Department of Commerce, said the agency was told it doesn’t have the legal authority to run criminal background checks. That’s because a 2018 executive order issued by Gov. Jeff Colyer banned executive branch departments from asking about criminal records during the interview process.
“We’ve got crystal clear guidance from the Department of Administration that executive branch agencies cannot perform these criminal history background checks,” North told lawmakers on Monday.
But the executive order said that ban applied only during the initial stage of the interview process, and the order said criminal background checks could still be done as a condition of employment. Yet Commerce officials said the order completely banned background checks.
The audit offered other options for checking the background of prospective employees.
The Kansas Bureau of Investigation has a publicly available tool that lets people search for public criminal history records for a small fee. Commerce could have used a consumer reporting agency to check candidates’ backgrounds, but North said the agency was never given that guidance. He speculated that the agency would be told that violates the spirit of the executive order.
Sen. Caryn Tyson, a Parker Republican, didn’t buy the agency’s explanation.
“Respectfully, Mr. North, you are looking for a scapegoat. Accept responsibility,” she said. “You hired a felon to manage millions of dollars in grant money and you’re looking for a scapegoat. I can’t imagine any business that would not do some kind of checks.”
Tyson and North both want the Legislature to change state law to allow criminal background checks. The Legislature returns in January and could take action on background checks and data on economic development projects.
A separate audit presented to lawmakers on Monday found that Commerce doesn’t provide enough information about economic development projects. The audit said that statistics on return on investment, for example, aren’t available on every single project.
The Department of Commerce said it has the information for every project it is required to do, and some of the missing information is from other state agencies that don’t compile these records. Getting the data would also be too much work for Commerce staff, the agency said.
This article first appeared on Beacon: Kansas and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
