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Attorney General investigating Clerk of Courts Davis

By Mike Jones newsroom@heraldstandard.Com 6 min read
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The state Attorney General is investigating whether Washington County Clerk of Courts Brenda Davis manipulated time cards for her employees hundreds of times over the past year that allegedly paid them for hours in which they weren’t working or were out of the office.

A search warrant filed at District Judge Kelly Stewart’s office in Washington and obtained by the Observer-Reporter newspaper Tuesday detailed more than 400 documented instances in which the electronic time sheets were allegedly edited by Davis for seven employees, which added a combined $12,690 to their pay stubs.

The edits went back to 2020 when Davis became clerk of courts, according to the search warrant, but county officials only began documenting the discrepancies in May 2021. While the changes for four employees only occurred that May, time cards for two others continued until November, while another worker still had edits being performed up until March of this year, according to the search warrant’s affidavit.

As the department’s elected row officer, Davis controlled the process of approving the hours for her employees and could adjust them in her software system, if warranted. Investigators wrote in the search warrant that they have time-stamped surveillance video corresponding with each edit showing employees leaving the Washington County Courthouse at the end of their workday before their hours were extended in the payroll system. The employees are named in the search warrant, but the newspaper is not releasing their identities because it’s unclear whether they are also under investigation.

County officials became suspicious after they reviewed the amount of compensatory hours paid to one employee in the office, prompting them to look at the time cards for the rest of the workers in the department. That’s when officials found numerous edits on employee time sheets, according to the affidavit.

In one case on Aug. 11, an employee logged out of work at 4:39 p.m. and was seen on surveillance video leaving the courthouse two minutes later. Around the same time, Davis changed the employee’s sign-out time to 5:30 p.m. before extending it again to 7 p.m., according to the search warrant. Davis was later seen leaving her office at 5:21 p.m. and locking her department’s door behind her.

In other cases, employees were granted working hours on weekends or holidays when they weren’t in the office. If they were working remotely or from home, the state court’s database would show that because they would not have access to any work-related materials without logging in.

County Commissioner Larry Maggi referred the matter to the Attorney General’s office in August over concerns about the “manipulating” of employee pay, according to the search warrant. Maggi declined to comment Tuesday because the situation remains under investigation.

County officials contend the unauthorized payments could be well above the $12,690 alleged in the search warrant because not all edits could be tracked alongside employee work time.

Davis was not available Tuesday afternoon when a reporter went to her office inside the courthouse, and she did not respond to an email asking for comment on the investigation.

The warrant, which is public and was filed at Stewart’s office April 5, was executed at the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts in Philadelphia for information detailing exactly when each clerk of courts employee logged into and out of the state’s judicial database since Jan. 1, 2020, until present. The warrant was returned May 19 and lists the inventory of what was seized as a spreadsheet on an AOPC database showing the log-ins for the seven employees who allegedly had their time sheets changed.

Neither Davis nor any of her employees had been charged as of Tuesday afternoon, and it was unknown if any of them had spoken to state investigators. John DiLucente, a special agent for the Attorney General who specializes in public corruption and fraud investigations, did not respond to a phone message seeking comment on where the inquiry stands. However, DiLucente wrote in the affidavit that he needed a search warrant to check the AOPC’s database to see if any of the employees logged into the system with their user names outside normal business hours to corroborate whether they received any “unearned pay” during those times.

“This will determine if these employees were working during the evening hours or on weekends which could entitle them to overtime and thus account for the edits to their time sheets by Brenda Davis,” DiLucente wrote in the search warrant.

This is not the first time an investigation has been launched into the county’s clerk of courts office. Frank Scandale, who preceded Davis in office before she defeated him in the 2019 election, pleaded guilty in October 2020 to stealing more than $97,000 from his department over several years. He was ordered to pay $117,889 in restitution and sentenced to home confinement.

County Commission Chairwoman Diana Irey Vaughan said the new investigation into the current clerk or courts is troubling.

“It’s a sad state of affairs in the county where we’ve had to turn over information of alleged wrongdoing to the Attorney General’s office for another elected official in Washington County,” Irey Vaughan said during a phone interview Tuesday.

Irey Vaughan said Scandale’s conviction and the latest situation with the clerk of courts office were the driving factors in pursuing a Government Study Commission to allow voters to decide whether to make changes to county government. Voters overwhelmingly rejected the ballot referendum in the November 2021 election, so an 11-member study commission was never formed.

“When this information came to light (last summer), that convinced me it was time to place an ordinance on the election ballot asking our citizens if they wanted to study our government,” she said. “This was a tipping point for me.”

The reason for why the time cards were edited is unclear, but there has been an ongoing feud between the county commissioners and Davis and several other courthouse row officers over the past year. The commissioners removed numerous duties and employees from the clerk of courts office last summer and fall after Davis waived some of her department’s responsibilities.

The situation boiled over Nov. 24 when President Judge John DiSalle ordered that juvenile case files be removed from the clerk of courts office and stored with the county’s Juvenile Probation Office. Davis allegedly attempted to block sheriff’s deputies from moving the files, prompting them to briefly handcuff and detain her while preparing to take her to a contempt hearing before DiSalle. Davis complained of back pain following an altercation with the deputies, and she was permitted to leave the courthouse to seek medical treatment.

The contempt hearing has been rescheduled multiple times as Davis has appealed the situation to higher courts, and the state Supreme Court is reviewing the case now. It was not known when the court will decide on that matter or whether Davis will still face a contempt hearing once a ruling is made.

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