ATLANTA — Channel 2 Action News has learned that state investigators found that the state agency charged with helping Georgia’s disabled citizens overpaid a family member of one state employee by more than $50,000. Investigative reporter Richard Belcher says the overpayments by the Georgia Vocational Rehabilitation Agency, or GVRA, continued for five to six years before someone at GVRA suspected the irregularities and asked the state’s inspector general to get involved.
GVRA says it fired two employees and a third one — involved in the early stages of the overpayments — resigned in 2018, well before anyone suspected the irregularities.
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According to Inspector General Scott McAfee’s March 2022 letter to GVRA, a family member of then-GVRA employee Kim Duncan received nearly $81,000 over six years to pay for disability assessments plus tuition, room and board, and books at Georgia Southern University and Auburn University. McAfee says that was a little more than $53,000 more than the client should have received.
McAfee says GVRA asked for help early last year, and the OIG documented the irregularities.
“We’ve got one counselor who abused her position, pushed a conflict of interest, and another counselor who just wasn’t interested in doing his job,” McAfee told Channel 2.
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McAfee says his team found nearly 150 emails that Kim Duncan wrote to other GVRA workers lobbying for Duncan’s family member. “And she was doing it from her work email account. It was absolutely not something the policy allowed, and she was pushing it, and the net result was $53,000 lost to the state,” McAfee says.
The key factor in the overestimation of payments was failing to use the income of a divorced mother and father, says McAfee. Using both would have upped the total family income available for the student in question and lowered the state’s allowable contributions.
GVRA sent a statement that reads in part: “The GVRA terminated the counselor as well as a colleague who assisted her in obtaining (the) overpayment. ... A third employee involved in the transactions early-on resigned in 2018.” The statement says the employees in question violated GVRA’s policies as well Gov. Kemp’s ethics policy.
In its statement, GVRA also says the agency has created what it calls a “dedicated quality assurance unit” to ensure that counselors follow the rules when assessing clients’ financial-level eligibility for state assistance.
McAfee told Channel 2 he believes the agency is committed to transparency. “We have every indication so far that this agency is taking it seriously. They want to change.”
McAfee added that his investigators found that some GVRA workers didn’t know the rules like they should have. “We need people to understand exactly what’s there, because what we found was that (on) the front lines, there’s some confusion among the counselors. So you need to make it clear the income that’s to be considered so that this doesn’t happen again,” he told Channel 2.
McAfee concluded there was no criminal intent, so he did not ask the attorney general’s office to open a criminal investigation of the overpayments, but he is asking that the AG pursue civil action to recapture the $53,000.
Channel 2 is not using the name of the person who received the overpayments.
Kim Duncan’s attorney has not provided a state on behalf of his client.
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