Audit: School of the Arts Official Gave Pricey State Laptop To Son | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: The author of this post is Dan Way, who is an associate editor for the Carolina Journal, John Hood Publisher.

    CIO Lisa Smith keeps six-figure job though she may have violated state law

    RALEIGH  -  A high-ranking manager at the UNC School of the Arts will keep her $114,695 a year job despite investigative findings that she improperly gave a state computer to her son for use at college and then obtained another one for herself at taxpayer expense.

    According to the report released Thursday by the Office of State Auditor, Lisa Smith, chief information officer at the 1,100-student residential school in Winston-Salem, "misappropriated state property," and broke school technology use policy.

    She "may have violated" a state statute prohibiting procuring state property for personal use, a misdemeanor, the audit said.

    Smith was not in her office Thursday. The person answering her phone said Smith had been off work "a few days" and that "at this point it's inconclusive" when she would return to work. She could return as early as Friday or next week, the employee said.

    Quoting a prepared statement by Interim Chancellor James Moeser, Lauren Whitaker, School of the Arts news services manager, said: "A mistake was made. It was a misuse of state equipment and the university has taken appropriate disciplinary action."

    Whitaker would neither identify Smith as the subject of the investigation nor describe the discipline. She said Smith is still employed at the school and would return as chief information officer.

    "As a taxpayer it's disappointing" that the discipline appears to be minimal for such a serious offense, state Auditor Beth Wood said. "We put people into positions, and they're supposed to be good stewards of our money, and here you have somebody who's taking advantage of their position for personal gain."

    Wood said when taxpayers see a case like this they might rightly wonder "what other things have been done."

    The investigation was not a full-blown audit, but a probe launched after a tip to the auditor's hotline.

    "When we got the tip, we weren't sure of everything that might have been involved, but it turns out that this computer was it," she said.

    The laptop, a $2,373 Apple MacBook Pro, was still in perfect working condition when it was recovered, despite Smith having reported it as broken, Wood said.

    Smith claimed the laptop was malfunctioning because it wouldn't connect to wi-fi and the school's Virtual Private Network that allows it to connect to a school server from a remote location. She purchased a replacement MacBook Pro for $2,828, and gave the other laptop to her son for use at home, and later at Appalachian State University.

    Forensic investigators determined the laptop had been connected to a wi-fi network at Appalachian State.

    Smith "attempted to conceal her son's use of the laptop computer by deleting his unauthorized user profile," the audit said. "The CIO later admitted that she deleted the unauthorized user profile the day before investigators took possession of the laptop."

    "This was the chief information officer, so this was the person who was the division head with a lot of authority to make decisions. And in this case that authority was abused, and the School of the Arts didn't really have any procedures in place to catch this sort of thing," Wood said.

    Division heads don't need approval from a supervisor when they purchase equipment.

    "If this was an average employee asking for a piece of equipment like this, you'd have to get approval," Wood said.

    Although Smith claimed the computer was broken, "there was no [work order] ticket for her computer, it was not given to anyone to be fixed, there was no evidence" any attempt to repair the computer was attempted even though it was under warranty, Wood said.

    "The oversight was just not there."

    Nor did the laptop show up on subsequent inventories as missing because the school has a policy that assets valued below $5,000 are not recorded.

    In contrast, the auditor's office and other UNC system schools include computers in inventory lists "just because they so easily could be walked away with," Wood said. There is a "need to know where they are and who has them."
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