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Council Hammers Info Whiz Over City Residency Fraud

Posted on: Wednesday, 1 March 2006, 06:00 CST

By Mark Mcdonald, Philadelphia Daily News

Mar. 1--How do you trust a guy who would lie about something as basic as the city's residency requirement, City Councilman Frank Rizzo wanted to know.

Case in point: Michael Dean, the city's deputy chief information officer, who resigned his $148,000 job after the city's inspector general conducted a lengthy undercover surveillance investigation that proved Dean lives in Havertown and not at a commercial property on Spring Garden Avenue as Dean had alleged.

Trouble is, Dianah Neff, the city's chief information officer and Dean's boss, is going on leave March 10 for knee-replacement surgery on both knees. She won't be back until the end of April and wants Dean to stay on the job "for continuity" to oversee day-to-day operations until then.

Though deeply disappointed in his behavior, Neff considers Dean her golden boy, one of the best information-technology whizzes she's ever seen. She asked the mayor to let her keep him on until April 30 and Street agreed, she said.

"Who knows what the mental state of that person will be for the next month," Rizzo mused. "If he wanted today to go into our system and, I'll use the word, 'sabotage' it, create a problem... he could do that."

Neff said that would be "difficult."

"We will be able to track and see if he goes into any applications on a daily basis. Should there be any violation or concern, we'd immediately shut that access off," she pledged.

Councilman Michael Nutter, who initiated the questions about Dean during Neff's budget presentation to Council, wondered whether the city would try to get salary reimbursement from Dean. No, Neff said, Dean got paid for the work he did.

Nutter also raised questions about roughly $29,000 in reimbursement that Dean was seeking for his costs in pursuing an MBA at Temple University under a city tuition-reimbursement program. Neff said he would not get that payment.

Neff said that Dean had an initial 180-day residency waiver, which the mayor's office extended another 180 days after her request.

"I had high hopes for Michael and his abilities," she said, "and I wish this had not occurred."

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Copyright (c) 2006, Philadelphia Daily News

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Source: The Philadelphia Daily News

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