Battling Corruption During COVID-19: A Discussion with Ohio Inspector General Randall Meyer

By: Alexander Johnson

This interview with Ohio Inspector General Randall Meyer took place on Wednesday, September 9, 2020 via Skype phone call.

Interview Highlight:

Q: Can you tell me a little bit about your background?

I am a long-time public servant. I was in the U.S. Navy, where I was an avionics technician. I got my first taste of security and law enforcement while I was in the service, where I was in the auxiliary security force for my base. 

I’m originally from Cincinnati, and my wife and I decided to come back to my roots in Ohio in the early 90s. I got a job in a small town north of Cincinnati called Wilmington. I was a police officer there for two-and-a-half years and then rose in the ranks to be a detective. That’s really where my passion was always at — crime solving, putting the puzzles together, interviewing people and trying to get confessions.

In 1998 I handled a case in Wilmington where a local gang had beat up two fourteen-year-olds and sent them both to the hospital. One had a traumatic brain injury and almost died at Children’s Hospital. I was successful in sending around six people to prison for the assault and the attack on these two fourteen-year-olds. I got noticed by the Attorney General’s Office, who was setting up an anti-gang task force. 

I was hired in 1999 to come up to Columbus to work for then-attorney-general Betty Montgomery and I was one of the gang investigators with the anti-gang unit. But we also did identification work and education work all across the state.

Q: For those who don’t know, what are some of your responsibilities as Inspector General of Ohio?

The Inspector General’s Office investigates and makes recommendations concerning alleged wrongful acts and omissions in the executive branch of state government. We identify weaknesses of state processes, and we do that by monitoring and reporting.

An important piece of this is that my authority is only over the Governor’s office, from the Governor all the way down to his cabinet agencies. Our statute explicitly precludes the auditor of state, the attorney general, the secretary of state, and the treasurer, so we have no authority to investigate those agencies.  We have no authority to investigate the legislature or the judicial system and the courts.

This authority still includes roughly 156,000 State of Ohio employees including the state universities and medical colleges; Ohio Department of Transportation and Ohio Department of Public Safety; The Bureau of Workers’ Compensation; The Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections; and just a handful of the 23 cabinet-level agencies. 

We also have the authority to investigate those seeking to do or doing business with the State of Ohio within those agencies. That’s where the breadth of our authority really expands. You think of any company that is doing business with the State of Ohio, and we have the authority to investigate them to make sure that they’re doing right by the contract and also doing right by the state as well.

Q: Does a formal complaint always have to be filed with the inspector general to prompt an investigation?

It does not. I have authority to self-initiate. The downside to that is I have a staff of fifteen people. It’s a limited budget for what we do, just over $2 million a year. In the going-on-ten years I’ve been Inspector General, we’ve identified a quarter-billion dollars in lost revenue to the state. So the return on investment is obviously much greater for our agency. But as budgets go, there’s always cutbacks. 

Obviously COVID has impacted us this year and we’ve taken a 20% cut on our budget. But in the past years, we would take a 13% decrease one year, 8% another year, and one year we were kept flat at zero. Last year we were successful in getting an increase, but it makes it really tough to be timely in what we do.  To have the full authority to self-initiate an investigation, you’ve really got to stretch your resources thin to take on new cases when you’ve got a budget like that.

Q: You mentioned COVID-19 — are there any other difficulties that that has posed for you? For instance, are you less staffed now? Is remote work making things difficult?

What makes it difficult for us, especially early on — you know, March, April, May, June, those months when we were still trying to figure out what all of this meant for not only us but the State — is when you have workers that are working from home. I’m not talking about our staff but for the agencies that we investigate and you have a target investigation, you can’t just go to that agency and interview them. 

In our world, and most investigators would agree with this I think, you want to have a face-to-face interview with your suspect or your target of your investigation. There’s so much gained from just the personal interactions.

Facial expressions, micro-expressions, the movements that people do that you won’t pick up over the phone or even on a Zoom-type interview. It’s also hard to do an interview in person when someone’s wearing a mask. That has impacted us a great deal this year. 

A lot of the other work we do as far as comparing records and doing data analysis. We do a lot with banks and telephone companies for those types of records, and they’ve been pretty well-versed in getting us the records we need. If the staff’s not in their office to pull records and pull things down, that adds a delay.

Q: What mechanisms and procedures do you have for seeing an investigation through once it’s started?

For us, and for every state employee, when it comes to state records — email, phones — you have no expectation of privacy like you would if you were […] a private citizen who is in their home. There’s your constitutional amendment to be secure in your home and your person.

As state employees, when you’re using state equipment, you no longer have that because it’s not your items that you’re using.  When you hear cases of somebody surfing porn or shopping on their work computer, it’s easy enough for the agency to take action on those kinds of offenses.

With that said, we have authority to enter any premise and obtain any document without warrant when it comes to state buildings and the government. In the simplest terms, and at the highest level, I could actually have investigators go into the Governor’s office and remove documents from his desk, without warrant, if it was part of one of our investigations. That kind of gives you the scope of our authority within this office.

I don’t take that power lightly. It’s something that you have to respect and you have to use when it’s needed.  Normally we’ll go through the normal channels, we’ll contact the chief legal from an agency to request the documents.

We don’t have to go in and seize documents on site. We’ve done that in the past when the target is someone in […] a higher-up position where we don’t want them to know we’re looking at them until we’re ready.

Q: Which office, department or agency have you looked into the most in your time there?

Which agency of the Governor’s? Our larger agencies seem to be the agencies that come up on our radar more often, whether it be from complaint or self-initiated investigations. We’ve looked at the Department of Rehab and Corrections and Ohio Penal Industries, it’s a prisoner work program.

The prisons operated dairy farms and cattle farms, and they shut those down in the early years of the Kasich administration. We investigated how they got rid of the farm implements that they had. How they auctioned it off, what they used the proceeds for, and that was a relatively large case for us.

In one case involving Ohio Penal Industries, they were using inmates as their personal laborers. The director of OPI had inmate labor taken out to work on her farm, they were having them help pick up and deliver personal items, working on their own vehicles without payment to the State of Ohio, and they were discounting that for other DRC employees.

Q: What are the implications of the work that you do for someone at the local level, say in a city like Kent or Ravenna?

To boil it down to the common citizen for the state of Ohio, no matter where they’re at, we protect tax dollars. Our goal is to make sure that your tax dollars that you pay into the state to operate the government is used efficiently and getting the most bang for the buck.

One example is the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. The former director had a conference table built by his Division of Forestry. This conference table was in a U-shape, and it was made out of solid black walnut, which was harvested from the state forests. They had to remove windows of the building to get this conference table into the second floor. It weighed over a ton. Why they needed a table that was so massive, I have no idea.

Their justification was it was to show off the Department of Forestry and Ohio’s lush forest grounds and how it’s an economic driver. It is a profit generator for the state of Ohio, but to have this table manufactured for them was just such a waste of taxpayer resources. 

That type of extravagance has no place in state government. The governor’s office has really nice furniture that was made by Ohio Penal Industry, but it’s not a chief executive’s of a large Fortune-500 company’s office space. It’s the CEO of the state of Ohio, but it’s very de minimus. It’s nothing so lavish as what ODNR built.

But that’s our role, to make sure that your tax dollars are spent correctly, without waste, fraud or abuse.