Top Investigator for L.A. Unified Gaining Tools to Fight Waste, Fraud

The final pieces are at last falling into place in a two-year campaign to create an independent and powerful investigative branch to uncover fraud, waste and abuse within the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Last week, the state Senate overwhelmingly approved a bill that would provide subpoena power to the school district’s top investigator, Don Mullinax. The Assembly is expected to approve the bill in coming weeks.

Mullinax also won local Board of Education approval last week for a $3-million augmentation of his budget, the first step in a five-year plan to nearly double his staff by adding 15 auditors and 21 investigators.

The ability to compel district employees and outside contractors to answer questions and turn over documents would make Mullinax an inspector general in all but name. Officially, he’s the director of internal audits and special investigations.

The new power and beefed-up staff make Mullinax one of the more formidable investigators in Los Angeles County, rivaling Arthur Sinai, inspector general of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Several other investigator general positions recently created by other agencies lack either staff or subpoena power.

State Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles) first raised calls for the district to set up an office of inspector general in June 1997 in response to revelations that contractors hired by the district to oversee the $2.4-billion Proposition BB bond had numerous ties to the troubled MTA.

Despite mounting pressure, school board members balked at creating a position some of them considered too powerful, especially one with the ability to compel subjects of investigations to cooperate.

Instead, late last year the board followed the recommendation of management consultant KPMG Peat Marwick on an overhaul of the district’s moribund office of internal audits.

Under the new plan, the audit branch was separated from the district’s chain of command and beefed up with a special investigations function. The chief auditor now reports directly to the board’s audit committee. The new job did not come with subpoena power.

The board hired Mullinax, a former investigator for the Department of Defense and the U.S. Senate, to head the operation.

Mullinax quickly prepared a five-year plan that included audits of key operations, many of which face virtually no outside oversight. The purchasing, payroll, accounts payable and contract management units would be among the first audited.

The lack of subpoena power arose as an issue again this spring after Mullinax was assigned to look into allegations of mismanagement and wrongdoing surrounding the half-completed Belmont Learning Complex, a $200-million downtown high school project now mired in environmental concerns.

Mullinax complained that his investigators were not receiving cooperation from all those they sought to question.

Hayden then introduced legislation that would grant that power to the newly established special investigations unit.

Abandoning its staunch opposition, the school board voted to support the bill.

It passed the Senate 34 to 1 after Republican opponents obtained an amendment that would cause the bill to expire Jan. 1, 2001.

Mullinax has said he does not expect to use the new power extensively.

“I can see where it could be a scary situation if you have an individual issuing subpoenas right and left, every day, that weren’t really justified,” he said in an interview. “It could do more harm than good. My experience has been you don’t have to issue that many. You issue a selected few to the right groups of people, and the word gets out.”