Former Beaufort Co. superintendent ordered to pay $7K after second SC Ethics investigation
Former Beaufort County School District superintendent Jeff Moss was found guilty of violating South Carolina Ethics laws on economic interests, the state’s Ethics Commission ruled Nov. 21, following a school board member’s 2018 complaint.
Moss was charged with one count of using his public employment to obtain other work with the controversial Education Research and Development Institute, which charges vendors to meet with superintendents across the country. The commission found probable cause for another charge of improperly accepting speaking fees from ERDI but agreed to dismiss the second charge in exchange for Moss’ acknowledgement of guilt in the first.
SC State Ethics Commission chairwoman Childs Cantey Thrasher and Moss agreed to the ruling, which states Moss must pay $6,659.72 to Beaufort County School District and $500 to the commission by March 31.
“I filed this back in 2018, and the ethics commission worked slowly on that,” board member JoAnn Orischak said Friday. “And I think the document speaks for itself.”
The commission found that Moss made $17,100 for participating in panels hosted by ERDI, as well as travel reimbursements. The expenses were spread among eight events from February 2015 and July 2018, his last month with the district after the board accepted his resignation on May 15 of that year.
Over the course of those three years, Moss requested — and received — $618.23 in travel reimbursement from the district for ERDI events, including mileage, parking and per diem. For seven of the days he attended ERDI conferences, he did not use annual leave.
Orischak said Friday she filed the complaint after noticing charges marked as “ERDI” on Moss’ district credit card reports from 2015 to 2018 and confirming with district chief financial officer Tonya Crosby that the superintendent had not reimbursed the district for these charges.
Moss’ unused annual leave days were included in his estimated $280,000 resignation package at a rate of $846.10 per day, with seven days totaling just under $6,000 of compensation.
According to the November consent order, Moss told the commission that he got leave requests approved by the district, “causing him to believe he was authorized to attend the ERDI conference.” He said he worked for the district “around the clock,” even when he was taking leave, and that any violation of the Ethics act was “unintentional.”
He also said he thought “his leave could qualify as professional development,” but agreed it was his “ultimate responsibility to ensure leave was recorded properly,” the ruling says. Finally, Moss said that “during his tenure he had many administrative assistants who assisted in entering his leave and reimbursement requests” and was unaware some were incorrectly submitted.
When reached Friday, Moss called the inclusion of annual leave “an unintentional whatever, slip with how it was coded in leave issues from years ago, which could have been easily corrected if it was brought to my attention or anyone else’s attention.”
“To be honest, the resignation package could have been easily remedied if it had been brought up before I departed in July,” Moss said.
He added that board members and auditors had the information presented to the ethics commission before his resignation and “had no problem with it.”
Board emails show that Orischak, who filed the ethics complaint on Oct. 3, 2018, messaged Moss regarding his ties to ERDI on May 28, 2018, saying she discovered he was a part of ERDI through his submitted expense reports.
Moss responded that day, saying he “gained permission from the board” to join ERDI. Orischak, who has been on the board since 2012, said Friday that she does not remember approving Moss’ involvement with ERDI, which began in 2014, according to the consent order.
Moss responded to requests for comment Friday evening, after this story was originally published. He said the $17,000 he was paid by ERDI was “completely irrelevant” to the ethics complaint, and its inclusion in the article was “personally or politically motivated.”
Orischak said Friday that the ruling suggests the board needs better guidelines for approving trips by the superintendent, since Moss’ response implies his employees recorded and approved his leave.
“I can certainly understand why his assistants would not point that to his attention,” she said. “And I don’t think it’s their responsibility to do so.”
Other investigations by ethics commission, FBI
The November ruling was not Moss’ first brush with the ethics commission as superintendent.
In 2016, he was found “unintentionally” guilty of two ethics violations because the district hired his wife for a district-level job paying $90,000 per year. Moss acknowledged the violations in a deal with the commission to avoid an ethics hearing and a third charge over his removal of a portion of the district’s nepotism rule dealing with the hiring of the superintendent’s relatives.
Moss is still the subject of an ongoing investigation by the FBI into the construction of May River High School and River Ridge Academy, which he oversaw.
Very little is known about the investigation. The district was notified of it nearly two years ago, but no details — including when it began, what potential crimes are being examined, who it is targeting and where it stands today —have been revealed publicly.
Moss said Friday he is “not aware” of any investigation into him by the FBI, and that he has not been contacted by the agency.
Since December 2017, the FBI has contacted at least four current and former district administrators, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in South Carolina has issued at least four subpoenas in relation to the investigation: to chief of operations Robert Oetting, chief financial officer Tonya Crosby, former district project manager Anthony Pernice and to the school district itself.
The fourth subpoena focused on Moss and asked for documents related to his five-year tenure with the district and his association with ERDI..
In September 2018, two months after leaving the district, Moss asked the school board for $35,000 to retain former U.S. Attorney Bart Daniel in the matter. He was denied. When asked Friday, Moss said he had not seen any of the subpoenas.
Retired district procurement coordinator Sandra Amsler, who oversaw district bids and contracts for construction, consultants and band instrument supplies, was interviewed by the FBI in “January or February,” according to a September email between then-superintendent Herb Berg and the board of education.
Amsler had a role in the 2013 selection of Hite Associates to build Bluffton’s May River High School and River Ridge Academy — she coordinated the committee that recommended the firm to Moss and the Board of Education.
The North Carolina-based firm had never built in South Carolina before, but Moss had used the firm when he was superintendent of Lee County, N.C., schools.
Over the course of construction, the projects’ estimated costs grew rapidly, from between $35 million and $43 million to $67 million for May River, and from $25.5 million to nearly $32 million for River Ridge.
Both schools are slated for a combined $26 million of expansions in the first wave of projects from November’s successful $345 million referendum.
The referendum’s success, after two failures under Moss in 2016 and 2018, has been credited to the replacement of six of the 11 board members in the 2018 election, as well as new superintendent Frank Rodriguez’s promises of a more transparent and communicative administration.
“The community as a whole has said the past is past,”referendum advocate Tom Gardo said the night of the Nov. 5 vote. “It’s fantastic to see.”
This story was originally published November 29, 2019 at 3:13 PM.