County OKs Background Checks for All New Hires

Spurred by the case of a county mental health manager who hid a felony record to land his job, the Board of Supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday to require criminal background checks of all new employees, from janitors to high-level managers.

The county will hire an outside firm to conduct criminal and driver’s license checks on applicants who have been offered jobs. For some upper-level managers, the checks will be used to verify education, Social Security numbers and credit records.

“Background checks are something we need to do,” Supervisor Frank Schillo said. “It’s about time we addressed this.”

The new policy will not affect some county departments that already conduct background checks, including the district attorney’s office, Sheriff’s Department and Probation. However, some current employees in other departments who are up for promotion could face investigations.

Until now, applicants for most county jobs have only been required to state whether they have ever been convicted of a felony.

If the county wanted to investigate all existing employees, that would require negotiating with the labor unions, said Barbara Journet, director of human resources for the county.

Supervisors requested a policy after investigators last year learned that Kevin DeWitt, the county’s former mental health administrator, had used a phony doctoral diploma and bogus transcripts to land his $83,000-a-year job. In June, the Ventura County Grand Jury called on all departments to do the checks on “prospective management and professional employees.”

Investigators, who were looking into improper billings in the county’s Behavioral Health Department, discovered that DeWitt had been convicted 10 years ago of eight bank-fraud charges for writing fake references on loan documents while he was a bank’s junior loan officer in Louisville, Ky.

DeWitt was sentenced to 120 days in jail in March after pleading guilty to felony charges of using forged documents.

A private firm chosen after a competitive bidding process will conduct the checks, at about $25 to $50 each. It could cost as much as $300 for an extensive check of upper-level managers who oversee financially sensitive areas, Journet said. For this year, the county expects to spend about $78,750, and $135,000 the next fiscal year.

The county hasn’t done background checks since about 20 years ago, when it had far fewer employees, Journet said. Administrators discontinued the program to save money, and because they were finding very little reason to disqualify potential employees.

“We had nothing in those years,” Journet said. “We just had some issues in the last year or so.”

DeWitt was the No. 2 man in the Mental Health Department when he resigned, culminating a year racked by scandal. In 1998, the Mental Health and Social Services departments merged into one superagency. The reorganization was rescinded when federal regulators said it violated Medicare billing rules. Some pointed at DeWitt as an integral part of the merger, which ended up costing the county $15 million in federal fines.

“We would have saved ourselves a lot” had the county done a background check on DeWitt, Schillo said. “We might not even have had the merger.”