RTC Office Has Its Ups and Downs : Finance: Local unit of the thrift liquidation agency says it exceeded goals, but it still faces a variety of allegations.

Federal thrift liquidators here, beset by allegations of mismanagement and sexual harassment, said Thursday that they will exceed their goals for selling real estate, loans and other property that belonged to now-failed California savings and loans.

The West Coast office of the Resolution Trust Corp. said that, in the first seven months this year, it has recovered $14.1 billion, or 98% of its annual target, from the sale of assets of failed California thrifts.

Local RTC officials told members of a government oversight panel at a public hearing that their success in ridding the agency of those assets prompted them to increase their goal for the year from $14.4 billion to $17.5 billion.

But whatever success the Newport Beach office might enjoy was muted by allegations that its top executives have set a tone of sexual harassment and discrimination and that nothing has been done about equal employment opportunity complaints that workers have filed.

Coordinators for the National Organization for Women’s local chapter voiced complaints from RTC workers about the all-male leadership at the Newport Beach office and the failure of the agency to confront the problems.

Four RTC executives discriminated against and harassed several women employees and retaliated against one for filing a complaint, Tamara Mason, a NOW coordinator, told the regional Thrift Depositor Protection Oversight Board.

One of those four, she said, is Alvin J. Felton, who manages the local office.

Felton is recovering from heart surgery and did not attend the hearing.

RTC spokeswoman Felisa Neuringer said the agency will not discuss personnel issues. Equal employment complaints take a long time to investigate, she said.

Legal procedures to handle sexual discrimination complaints simply regulate illegal gender-related offenses but do not confront and eliminate them, said Lisa McClanahan, another NOW coordinator.

She pointed out, for instance, that the RTC has done nothing yet about William Elsbury, a top lawyer at the office who is named in several sexual discrimination complaints internally. He is also accused by the agency’s own inspector general of conflict of interest, lying on his employment application and improperly billing the agency for personal travel and legal fees to fend off a disbarment action.

Lilly V. Lee, who chairs the regional board, said she will take written complaints from NOW and RTC employees to the agency’s director and to the Government Accounting Office when she visits Washington early next month. The GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, has previously been critical of RTC operations.

The charges are expected to receive wider recognition later this month when the Senate Banking Committee invites RTC whistle-blowers nationwide to a hearing on the continuing bureaucratic bungling at the agency. Several of the Newport Beach office’s 600 employees are expected to testify at the Sept. 23 hearing.

A Banking Committee source said that the local office is perhaps the most problematic of the agency’s six so-called super sites. Besides facing nine equal employment opportunity complaints, the West Coast office has been accused of violating federal laws and its own procedures, mishandling funds, failing to recover reasonable amounts when it sells assets and failing to oversee the work of contractors properly.

Local RTC managers, who will not talk officially, scoff at the complaints, saying many are old problems that have been corrected. They also blame snafus on the Byzantine RTC empire that, until recently, mixed local control with procedures that forced the office to go through the agency’s Denver office or its Washington headquarters.

While proceeds from real estate sales, for instance, are collected locally, the paperwork for accounting purposes goes through Denver, where it gets delayed and sometimes misplaced. The local office recently gained control of most of its own accounting work. Lawyers, meantime, had reported directly to Washington, not to the local manager.