Staffer at UMass Dartmouth Used Law Dean's State Credit Card for Personal Purchases, School Says
A staffer at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth used the former law dean’s school credit card to make personal purchases, the school has acknowledged.
University spokesman John Hoey acknowledged the unnamed employee made about $860 in unauthorized purchases on Fandango.com and Amazon.com during a three-month period, according to the Herald News and SouthCoastToday. The charges were not authorized by former law dean Robert Ward Jr., whose own credit card charges were under scrutiny.
The school did not intend to release information about the employee’s purchases, the stories say. They were inadvertently included when the school released credit card charges by Ward, who resigned his job in October. The release was in response to a public records request.
A university audit found Ward charged about $2,200 in personal expenses on the credit card he was issued in August 2010. He says he repaid the money “promptly and completely” when told of the oversight.
Ward has said his resignation was due to health and wellness issues, as well as a two-hour commute. The commute and “the pressure of building a world-class law school have taken a terrible toll on my health and my family,” he wrote in his resignation letter.
Many of Ward’s expenses were for flight tickets, hotel rooms and restaurants in Toronto, San Francisco and Washington. Many related to the school’s efforts to obtain accreditation from the ABA, the Herald News says. Other expenses were for the satellite radio company SiriusXM, the Newseum in Washington, D.C., and local restaurants, the Herald News says. The school did not identify which purchases were personal expenses.