Official Allegedly Failed to Reveal Criminal Past

A Ventura County manager who played a role in last year’s mental health merger debacle is being investigated for allegedly failing to reveal multiple felony bank fraud convictions when he was hired three years ago, The Times has learned.

Kevin DeWitt, 39, a former deputy director in the Behavioral Health Department, acknowledged Monday that he pleaded guilty in 1989 to eight federal charges of falsifying bank records. The convictions stem from fake references that DeWitt entered on loan documents when he worked as a junior loan officer at a Louisville, Ky., bank in the mid-1980s.

The bank lost an estimated $26 million as a result of bad loans processed by DeWitt, according to a 1989 Louisville newspaper article. In Ventura County, government lawyers are looking into allegations that DeWitt failed to disclose the convictions on a job application and during interviews for his $76,000-a-year mental health department post in 1996.

DeWitt, who now works in the county’s Human Services Agency, said Monday that he failed to check a box on his employment application indicating that he had been convicted of a felony because more than seven years had passed and he believed he was no longer obligated to do so.

Chief County Administrator Lin Koester said he is “extremely concerned” and has directed County Counsel James McBride to look into the allegations.

The mental health department has been in turmoil for more than a year as the result of its merger last year with the social services department.

DeWitt supported the merger and served as a “right-hand man” to former mental health Director Stephen G. Kaplan in formulating the proposal, sources said. The reorganization was rescinded by the Board of Supervisors nine months later, after federal regulators said it violated Medicare billing rules.

It spawned a series of investigations by state and federal agents that will cost the county at least $15.3 million in health care reimbursements.