The state comptroller’s office apprised the Joint House and Senate Education Committee yesterday of a spider’s web of alleged fraud spiraling out from former Tennessee School Board Association Director Dan Tollett.
Cashing out life insurance policies, illegally collecting retirement benefits, and defrauding over 600 teachers in an insurance scam, were finding released in an audit released by the Comptroller’s office this month.
State Treasurer Dale Simms, whose department oversees the retirement fund that paid out over 276-thousand dollars in benefits to Tollett, says the board and trustees governing the TSBA weren’t paying enough attention.
“One of the things we have all seen over the last five or six years in the corporate world, the Enron’s, the World Com’s, those types, AOL-Time Warner, there’s any number of those types where we’ve found, not to say this is the same magnitude as that, but what we have found is members in board rooms, were not as vigilant as they could be.”
Simms says the federal government has started to pass legislation dealing with this issue and recommended Tennessee think about doing the same. The Joint Education Committee is meeting this week to determine if changes in current laws would prevent this from happening in the future, or at least catch it earlier when it does.
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