Deputy Director of DC Dept of Bldgs Resigns after being found working multiple jobs
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Anonymous
| DC gives hiring preference to residents (who then have to quit if they leave DC before 7 years on the job) but tons of people don't live there. There's also a salary threshold above which you have to be a DC resident...unless a waiver is granted, and they frequently are. That's how a senior official at the Department of For-Hire Vehicles ran for Congress in Virginia, the head of DOEE lives in Columbia, etc. |
Anonymous
| I'm a FCC resident who's pretty disappointed in her. She may be smart and capable, but this points to some severe issues and an overall lack of ethics. I hope she steps down from her Council position. |
Anonymous
FCC resident too, what council is she on? |
Anonymous
| As an FCC resident while I dont support her choices I can understand them--not easy to pay for a respectable house here LOL |
Anonymous
| Is her FCC Council job also paid? |
Anonymous
This isn't grounds for getting rid of her? This is pretty egregious. And DC Department of Buildings is a hot mess. Shame on her. This is wage theft. I hope they go after her--she shouldn't be allowed to simply "resign." |
Anonymous
|
How does this woman have time to do all this? City Council isn't just a 2 hour per week hobby.
No kids? |
Anonymous
no |
Anonymous
If she was a Federal government employee she would be prosecuted for fraud against the federal government. It would be a felony. She's lucky she's DC government, as the overburdened USAO will not have the bandwidth to go after her. |
Anonymous
|
She’s a member of the Falls Church City Council, which provides a stipend of about $10k. She also has two kids in elementary and middle school. This is her first term — she was elected in 2022. She’s lived in Falls Church for nearly 20 years, so I’d be curious if she claimed residency for any District job.
https://www.fallschurchva.gov/DocumentCenter/View/15735/Caroline-Lian-Biography |
Anonymous
I don't get how they're just allowing her to resign. Doesn't DC fire anyone? They should claw back half her salary--because at best she was dedicating half her time to the job she was paid a full salary for. https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/08/07/dc-buildings-official-resign-jobs/ A top official at the D.C. Department of Buildings has resigned after an ethics probe found she was secretly working a separate full-time private-sector job on her city “telework” days — violations that resulted in a $25,000 fine from a D.C. ethics board. In addition, the official, DOB deputy director Caroline Lian, is a Falls Church City Council member — and allegedly attended to council business also on D.C. time, according to the Aug. 1 report from the D.C. Board of Ethics and Government Accountability. According to the BEGA’s findings, Lian never shared on required financial disclosure forms that she was also working as a risk-management director at Freddie Mac, a major housing finance company where she made six figures. And while she did disclose her public position as a Falls Church legislator, the BEGA found that on more than 10 occasions Lian attended to city council business and meetings on D.C. work days without logging time off. She also underreported her compensation as a council member, which Lian told investigators was an error that she has since corrected. According to the negotiated settlement, Lian worked a hybrid work schedule at DOB, typically coming into the office on Mondays and Fridays while teleworking Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. At Freddie Mac, she also worked a hybrid schedule — the opposite one, in which she came into the office on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, according to the BEGA. BEGA investigators wrote that Lian performed “essential work functions on [Freddie Mac’s] behalf during the hours of 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m., Monday through Friday, in direct conflict with her DOB tour of duty.” |
Anonymous
Maybe they would be less burdened if they had workers working full time rather than on other full time jobs. |
Anonymous
| Oh no, she did this by just working for the other company on telework days? Gonna ruin it for all of us. Although if she managed to get nothing done on telework days that's a management screw up too. |
Anonymous
Yup. Bad apples like Caroline Lian are going to be an excuse to curtail hybrid work schedules. I hope someone prosecutes her. She shouldn't be allowed to just resign and walk away with her pension intact after defrauding two employers and DC tax payers. And if you've ever tried to deal with DC Dept of Buildings--it is a particularly dysfunctional part of DC government. |
Anonymous
| This is why getting a building permit from DC is impossible. No one paying attention to anything! |