Summer Work Program for 725 Youths : Firm Under Investigation Loses Job Contract

The San Diego Regional Employment and Training Consortium voted Monday not to award a summer jobs contract to a company under state investigation.

IDET Corp. was denied a $636,400 contract to provide summer jobs for 725 youngsters in North County after the consortium heard that $69,148 in billings on other contracts from the firm have been held up by the San Diego city auditor. The summer contract was awarded instead to North County SET/Jobs for Progress.

The consortium--consisting of two San Diego City Council members, two county supervisors and one citizen--decides how to spend about $20 million in federal funds to train low-income adults and teens in San Diego County.

Last year, IDET was awarded the summer youth employment contract as well as other training work totaling $1.5 million from the consortium, its only client, said an IDET official.

But the company’s bid for a repeat performance on the summer contract was imperiled after the state Employment Development Department began investigating the company, said Stanley C. Schroeder, the consortium’s planning manager.

On Dec. 23, state agents raided IDET offices in San Marcos and confiscated the firm’s files.

State investigators will not say what they have found, a San Diego city attorney, John K. Riess, told commissioners Monday, except to warn consortium staffers to “be careful” when dealing with the firm.

The consortium has begun an investigation of the company’s billings since Feb. 3 and found “very serious irregularities and very serious discrepancies,” consortium Executive Director Aurelia Koby said. Riess said the irregularities included pre-dating training forms and the discovery that at least one person who signed the forms never received training from IDET.

IDET attorney Charles D. Christopher pleaded with the consortium not to use the investigations as a basis for denying the summer contract. IDET is “being murdered, if you will, in a corporate sense by innuendo,” Christopher said.

But Riess urged consortium members to deny IDET the contract and pick “the agency that has a clean record at this point in time.”

“There’s a little more than a black cloud,” Riess said. “Some rain has fallen on the IDET agency.”