The Backfiring of Firing Kathleen Davies

Delaware is very amateurish when it comes to smearing people.  No one takes smears seriously anymore and the consequences usually fall back on those pushing the smear forward.

Kathleen Davies works for Tom Wagner’s Auditor’s office.  She supports better control of charter school wastefulness and has been behind some of the very scary reports the Auditor of Delaware’s office has recently released, showing the blatant corruption and disregard for all taxpayers dollars, an illness that continues to run rampant throughout Kendall Massett’s charter school conglomeration…

We find she was put on administrative leave and her reports pulled from the website… Kevin has a copy of one (more?) of the pulled reports…

Her being put on administrative leave is very reminiscent of shutting down a casino because one is shocked, shocked, that legalized gambling is going on there…. 

 

Her alleged violation was “not following required procedure”.  Something we all do at work, usually for our own self interests, but in her case, she was doing it for both our state’s interests, the We, The People taxpayer’s interests……

Here is how it works.  If you work for the state in a high enough capacity,  you are given what amounts to a charge card which you use for state associated expenses.  If I’m required to go to Los Angeles to gather information on a national charter school network responsible for many of Delaware’s charter school accounting errors, and have to do so undercover, then I would use my card along the way and those expenses would be charged to the state and those who monitor whether expenses are spent wisely could immediately see that they were….

Charge cards are new.  The old way was to pay it from ones personal account and then be reimbursed back at some later time….  This was standard through most of our lives and is still allowable under law….

The charge is that Kathleen Davies used step 2  instead of step 1….

Now. Why would anyone working undercover to root out corruption of state funding not want to be immediately traced to the minute where they were or what they were doing? This action does not make sense to me… You see, if I was going to investigate something that was above the law, that required me to walk in and say I auditing your office today as required by law, show me your records…. I would WANT that office to know beforehand that I was enroute to their city, that I was staying overnight in a hotel close by, that I would be in early the next morning JUST SO THEY COULD WIPE OUT ALL INCRIMINATING DOCUMENTATION, DISPOSE OF ALL DAMAGING EVIDENCE, SCRUB ALL FINANCIAL TRANSACTIONS, just to make my job so much easier…

“Well, all looks good, nothing wrong here… Keep up the good work.”

Why would any auditor want to hide where they were, when they were coming, or what they were up to?  I just can’t understand such thinking….

Btw, this standard procedure probably should be corrected and allowed specifically by future legislation because there are certain arms of our democracy that do need secrecy in order to accomplish their jobs, which primarily is to hold people who can’t be trusted, accountable….

If you don’t want advanced knowledge of your whereabouts, you had better not use your credit card. One should not be punished for helping the state catch hardened criminals (which Charter School operators under Kendall Massett are rapidly becoming)

Here is what happened……

A phone call:   I need Kathleen Davies fired today… Do it.

Auditor Tom Wagner:  But she’s a great investigative employee, one of the best we’ve ever had? How can I possibly fire her?

Phone call:   Find something, or else; anything you can, just take her down today…...

The only thing they could find on a squeaky clean employee was this legal but secondary method of reimbursement for state caused expenses…  The state would of course prefer the use of the credit card just so they could have instant knowledge of her whereabouts, and that she did not give them….

And so, she gets a surprise ongoing 2+ month paid vacation courtesy of the person who made that call to Tom’s office. There is no savings to the taxpayer in all of this. Instead we get continued corruption plus paying the expense of an auditor who is doing nothing for which she is being paid….

But they bumbled… They made it public thinking that the smear would simply go unnoticed and all would assume she was guilty as charged… Well, guess what?  It didn’t work… Because far from being corruptible like Dave Sokola, Charlie Copeland, and Earl Jaques, she is a fighter for Delaware’s taxpayers and particularly those too young to pay taxes, Delaware’s students….

(Corruption in Charter Schools is rampant (95%) because under their charters, they are given carte blanche to do anything they want; that hurts all students.)  Kathleen Davies was one undercover guardian  and benefactor of all little children in Delaware…

So realizing their mistake, they garnered the News Journal to do a piece to taint her further….  But the evidence present there is a joke….

Listen to this comic and misguided attempt to smear a courageous fighter for little children…

“At issue is about $7,700 in reimbursements Davies received over four years for expenses she attested were work-related, like hotel stays, meals and mileage while traveling on state assignments.”

4 years is (365.25 X 4) = 1461 days…. That averages out to $5. 27 cents a day.  Really? Dismissing a prime state investigative employee for $5.27 cents a day done in reimbursement form instead of credit cards?  (The reality being that Delaware on average spends  $10,958,904 every single day (compared to $5.27)… They laid her off so it would then only spend $10,987,899 each day….

Which brings up a valid point.  Why do we have two state employees (now whistle-blowers) costing us each $68,987 a year, spending inordinate amounts of time looking over $5.27 cents average-per-day forms to find if something, if anything  is wrong?  Was it for the benefit of all Delaware’s citizens for which they searched for that averaged $5.27 cents in error?  Or was it under someones orders to find something, anything, that made them dig through $5.27 cents a day to paint a dirty picture?

Laughable?  OF COURSE.  Bumbling?  OF COURSE.

Just curious if we read this the same way.  Does this following sound like a smear to you, exactly the way the News Journal painted it?

“$517.54 for an out-of-state hotel stay and $25.50 for out-of-state meals. In December 2013, she was paid $558.28 for several categories of expense, including private car mileage, travel both within and out of Delaware, and meals. Then, after a break of several months, Davies was reimbursed $260 in May 2014 and $586 in June 2014.”

Oh My Goodness… Such Graft!  Such Corruption!  So much money being profligated!

But is it?  In a city, rooms cost $150 on the cheap (hooker prices) but one should expect to pay $250 to be deemed respectable. That amount quoted would be 3 days on the cheap, and 2 days at normal.  I must assume meals were included because I’m outraged I just spent $29.42 in one drive-thru visit buying cheap-ass McDonald‘s for just 5 people in my car…. Private car mileage reimbursement at close to the IRS figure is .445 cents per mile… In a normal day’s drive I’d be paid $44.50 each day… a day trip to DC would be $106; a day trip to NYC would be $89.00.  Throw in parking, meals, you are talking only about a 2 or 3 commuted day stints across a year, done quite frugally.

Math completely vindicates her… there is no crime here!  So why is she laid off?

Her testimony  before the House Educational Committee KILLED future Charter School development in this state, the pet project of Dave Sokola, Senator from the 8th District… Totally killed it. Zero. Nada… Today’s Private Charter Schools in Delaware are gasping their last breaths.. and no more will be built. Only  those school district-run Charter Schools such as in Red Clay’s district or Newark’s WHITE ONLY Charter School, have any hope of surviving past the next governorship….

She told the truth and for that ….. her boss got the dreaded phone call…. (see above)…

Directly lifted from the News Journal is all the evidence required to vindicate her… She is innocent of all charges and with a good guess we can conclude she was removed solely to stop her from digging further into Charter School malfeasance whose scope is so large, it is currently beyond Delaware taxpayer’s ability to imagine it…..

Bottom line: here is how to help her….. If you want change, this is how you begin it…

Support Dave Sokola’s opponent, Meredith Chapman, this election cycle in the 8th Senatorial District… It means voting for a Republican but unlike her opponent, that Republican is a good honest decent person…

Or if you don’t really care about auditors, charter schools, skull drudgery, but do care about Delaware overall, this is the one state legislative campaign you will need to watch closely…. and if you live in upper Newark, you need to vote to unseat your incumbent!

The evil leeching out of Delaware’s 8th Senatorial District has been oozing long enough….. It needs plugged.