The Columbian | Serving Clark County, Washington

Stevenson, WA — The Skamania County Sheriff’s Office has completed a five-month investigation of former Skamania County Auditor J. Michael Garvison’s travel expenses and is recommending that Garvison be charged with first-degree theft and destruction of official documents.

“J. Michael Garvison utilized county funds for repayment of per diem (expenses) and travel not authorized by county travel policy,” the report concludes. “He also told his staff to destroy documents that have not met the retention required by the state.”

The investigation was completed last Friday, and its findings were forwarded to Skamania County Prosecuting Attorney Peter Banks on Monday. It examined Garvison’s travel expenses and travel vouchers between May 2007 and September 2009 and concluded that the former auditor had claimed and received $4,885.77 in unauthorized mileage and $1,766 in unauthorized per diem expenses during that period.

While claiming $450 a month in mileage for use of his personal vehicle, Garvison also ran up $13,000 in county repair bills and improvements on a $3,300 county jeep assigned to his office, the investigation found.

Garvison’s expenses are the subject of an ongoing state audit. He resigned his auditor’s job in early November and accepted a job with the Clackamas County Soil and Water Conservation District in Oregon City, Ore.

County commissioners have since appointed a new auditor, Tim Todd, who will seek election to the post in November.

Garvison did not cooperate with the investigation. At the advice of his Vancouver attorney, Jon McMullen, he refused to be interviewed by investigators.

“It’s extremely early in the process,” McMullen said Thursday. “As of yet, it’s not clear what, if anything, the prosecuting attorney’s office in Skamania County is going to do with this case. It is not the case that every police report forwarded gets charged.”

He declined to comment on the investigation’s specific findings.

Banks did not return calls from The Columbian seeking comment.

But Detective Sgt. Monte Buettner, co-leader of the sheriff’s investigation and co-author of the report, said he expects that “at some point, it will be forwarded to the attorney general. I know that we made an additional copy of the report for the attorney general.”

It is common for county prosecutors to ask for the attorney general’s help in prosecuting cases involving other county officials.

Jasen McEathron, audit manager in the Vancouver office of the state auditor’s office, said he was aware of the sheriff’s investigation.

“Their work is independent of ours,” he said. “We have been in communication so that we could work cooperatively and not step on their toes.”

Skamania County commissioners are waiting for the state audit to tell them exactly how much Garvison owes the county before filing a civil claim against him.

“Notwithstanding the criminal process, this board is fairly comfortable saying we are going to go after him for that money,” said Commissioner Paul Pearce said. “When we get that report, there will be a civil action.”

Expenses questioned

Garvison’s billing of county taxpayers for questionable travel first came to the attention of the sheriff’s office last October, when Buettner met with Bradley Andersen, who was representing one of Garvison’s former employees.

Andersen, a former Skamania County Prosecutor, said his research revealed that Garvison had billed the county about $32,000 for travel in the first nine months of 2009, including trips to conferences in Las Vegas, Washington, D.C., Montreal and twice to Florida, and nearly $51,000 in 2008.

In their own investigation, Buettner and Chief Civil Deputy Pat Bond examined 26 months’ worth of travel vouchers and interviewed every past and present employee of the auditor’s office who had worked with Garvison.

They found that Garvison routinely overinflated his mileage and claimed per diem for meals when he was not entitled to reimbursement under county travel policy. In November 2007, for example, he claimed 457 miles for a round trip to Olympia, when the authorized reimbursement was for 262 miles.

“From day one, at every turn, I was surprised what was occurring,” Buettner said. “It would have been nice to learn about it earlier, so we could have done something about it sooner.”

Interviews with staff members revealed that in January 2009, Garvison ordered his staff to destroy all vouchers from 2007 and earlier, even though his office was required to keep the vouchers for at least six years.

Employees told investigators that when they questioned his order, Garvison told them it was OK to dispose of the vouchers because the state auditor’s office had reviewed them already.

Employees also told investigators in November that Chief Deputy Auditor Heidi Penner had informed them that they were required to meet with Banks — the county’s prosecuting attorney — to discuss how to answer investigators’ questions before they could be interviewed by the sheriff’s office. After Sheriff Dave Brown contacted Banks, Penner allowed the interviews to proceed.

Early warning

State auditors warned county commissioners in late 2008 that they had found inadequate documentation of travel and other expenses in Garvison’s office, including reimbursement claims “for per diem costs while not in travel status,” “unsupported” travel claims, and extra days in travel status “with no clear business purpose.”

County commissioners also were aware two years ago that Garvison was refusing to comply with a state law that required him to deposit certain auditor’s fees in a homeless housing account. Garvison refused to do so, Pearce said. Instead, he kept that money in the auditor’s operating account and used it to pay the salary of a new employee and buy expensive imaging software.

“We had been arguing with Mike to have that transferred into a stand-alone fund so we knew where it was,” he said. “We even created a line item for it (in the county budget), and he still refused to transfer the money. We considered whether to take him to Superior Court and decided against it.”

Last year, commissioners dipped into the auditor’s account to help fund a $50,000 affordable housing project, but they later learned that the project was not eligible for the homeless funds.

The county has been scrambling since Garvison left to reimburse the homeless housing account, which was owed $143,410, and to pay back the $50,000 owed to the auditor’s operating account.

County officials are in the process of transferring money from the general fund to make those accounts whole. Pearce said the county intends to seek reimbursement from Garvison to replenish its general fund.

Kathie Durbin: 360-735-4523 or kathie.durbin@columbian.com.

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