Private Funds OKd for Use in Prosecutions : District attorney: A special unit will seek out bogus workers’ compensation claims under a pilot program.

A special unit of the Ventura County district attorney’s office will begin seeking out and prosecuting bogus workers’ compensation claims after county supervisors on Tuesday approved a controversial plan to use private contributions to pay for the effort.

Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury, who earlier this year established a fund to receive contributions from local businesses to pay for such prosecutions, said Tuesday he will start the 12-month pilot program by the end of May.

The experimental program will spend $40,000 in county money and more than $150,000 donated by Ventura County employers to hire an additional attorney and investigator for the unit.

If no money is available to continue funding the program after a year, it will be discontinued, Bradbury said.

But some legal scholars said they are uncomfortable with the prospect of using private funds to pay for public prosecutions.

“I think it’s a very high-risk venture to rely on private financing for the employment of public prosecutors,” said Gerald Uelmen, dean of the Santa Clara School of Law.

“Even if you manage to insulate any direct conflict of interest, there’s a real concern with the appearance of conflict,” he said.

Prof. Samuel Pillsbury of Loyola Law School in Los Angeles agreed.

“We want our public prosecutors to be paid in a way so they have no self-interest in how they handle their business,” he said.

“When that office is taking money from individuals or companies to fund prosecution efforts, that raises at least the appearance of a bias in those people’s direction.”

Bradbury, whose office must cut between 7.5% and 10% from next year’s budget, defended the pilot plan as the only way to get workers’ compensation fraud cases to court. More than $800,000 already has been whittled from the district attorney’s $12.4-million budget over the past two years.

“In a perfect world I would not want to take private funds for any prosecution effort,” he said. “But where there is just no funding to address a serious problem, I think we have to kind of balance the scales.”

In keeping with a legal opinion from the state attorney general, the donated funds are placed in a blind trust so prosecutors will not know which companies have paid into the account.

Bradbury said that in practice, it would not matter whether his office knew the identity of the contributors.

“We’re in the trust business,” he said. “It would be unethical to bring a prosecution because someone had made a contribution, or not to bring a prosecution because someone had not.”

Public Defender Kenneth I. Clayman said while he did not oppose the effort, it may lead to more work for his office. In normal economic times, funding also would be provided for the extra defense costs generated by such a program, he said.

“If a case were to crop up tomorrow, we could not do it,” he told supervisors. “We do not have the staff.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. John L. Geb, who supervises the agency’s fraud unit, said Ventura County has never prosecuted a fraudulent workers’ compensation insurance case.

“But the costs in recent years have become so high and the system is so flawed in California that one way of relief is looking at prosecution,” he said.

A number of employer groups supported Bradbury’s fraud unit at the public hearing Tuesday.

“There’s a basic need for aggressive prosecution” of workers’ compensation fraud, said Frederick H. Bysshe Jr., an attorney who said he represented the private legal community.

“We’re sad that the private sector has to be looked to to bring a prosecutorial focus to this problem, but we understand the budget constraints,” he said.

Local officials say the number of workers’ compensation fraud cases in Ventura County is small contrasted with Los Angeles County, which experts say accounts for more than 73% of such cases statewide.

But prosecutors said they are eager to stop what fraud is occurring locally and deter “workers’ comp mills,” or law firms and physicians that encourage false claims.

“We understand that some fraudulent activity is in the county,” Geb said. “We know where to start looking.”

Tuesday was not the first time Bradbury has used private money to fund programs that his office could not afford. Several years ago, the Ventura Chamber of Commerce and some local banks contributed money to start a program that targets bad-check writers, he said.

Now that program “pays for itself, and it also makes money for the county,” Bradbury said.