5 MDOT Employees Arrested For Embezzlement, Fraud
Published: August 11, 2009
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) - State Auditor Stacey Pickering says five Mississippi Department of Transportation employees have been arrested on charges of embezzlement, fraudulently obtaining public funds, making false entries in public records and conspiracy.
Pickering says the five people arrested Tuesday worked in the MDOT office in Yazoo City and were indicted by a grand jury earlier this month. The indictment followed an investigation by his office that began in 2007.
Charged were 45-year-old James Kevin Ellis, of Benton; 35-year-old Gene Edward Taylor, of Yazoo City; 56-year-old Clarence Shelton, of Benton; 51-year-old Ivory Luckett, of Satartia, and 53-year-old James D. Malone, of Yazoo City.
The auditor office is also seeking the recovery of money - ranging from about $4,500 to under $200 - from each of the five men.
Reader Reactions
Thank You, it’s more than ‘About Time’ that this has Finally Happened ; and these underlings aren’t and can not be the only ones. If these are the only ones, then their immediate and probably next level up should be terminated for doing an absolutely atrocious job of supervision / management : if not their total involved also. There really can’t be anyone, all the way up to the very top, that doesn’t know that this practice goes on and has gone on for a long time - they came up through the same chain of events.
That MDOT operation has no outside evaluation, if any of the other divisions do have. I know some of the mid-level and lower employees that just can not figure out what or why they do or don’t do what their job should require them to do if they were doing it for themselves. Accuracy is not a requirement; a hand-grenade is close enough - then bill for the tight accuracy amount of time is would take; and if all the tolerances are sloppy loose, then everything will seem to fit or it’s easy to slip them to fit with no questions.
Please dig through any-every thing that involves tight attention to detail, especially the folks that go out on a job and just sit in their (our) truck for hours or don’t even go to the job and log their time as being on the job.
You do not have to work at / for MDOT to see their employees behavior doing stuff on company time that if I / We did it, we’d be fired at a minimum, pay a gigantic fine, pay the money and equivalent hours money for miss-use (no-use) of expensive equipment that probably had to have even more bought to get the work done while the goof-offs’ sat in the shade. And then send them to prison where they get a good reputation to drag around in their resume / work history.
Yep, Please get them all in front of a jury full of folks tired of paying government folks for stealing from us that depend on their integrity and accuracy for our SAFETY.
And if God will forgive anyone, Please let Him begin with us, for not going into the MDOT head office and voicing our objections to the questionable behavior / action (lack-there-of) we have all had the time to have paid attention to - those MDOT employees WORK for US!
Advertisement