Ex-HR chief files complaint
By Steve Herring
Published in News on October 27, 2014 1:46 PM
Sue Guy, who was fired earlier this month from her job as Wayne County human resources director, has filed a complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Center.
The complaint, she said, is the first in a "laundry list" of items that also could include legal action against the county.
Ms. Guy said she could not comment further, and EEOC spokesman Joseph Olivares said the agency could not comment, either.
"Title VII strictly prohibits us, by law, from confirming or denying the existence of discrimination charge filings, investigations, or administrative resolutions," Olivares said.
Information about specific cases only becomes public if and when the EEOC files a lawsuit, he added.
The EEOC is not mentioned in Ms. Guy's letter to Wayne County Manager George Wood, which was written in response to the termination letter Wood sent her.
However, her letter does hint of legal action.
Ms. Guy said that because of what she calls Wood's pattern of ignoring appeal rights, following the county's appeal procedure "would simply delay our action moving forward."
Wood fired Ms. Guy on Oct. 9 for failure to do her job.
Wood has said he fired Ms. Guy and payroll supervisor Linda Tipton because of a county payroll problem that stretched back at least 14 years and that will cost the county more than $76,600 to correct.
The problem is a flawed system that Wood said not only failed to pay a retirement benefit for some law enforcement officers, but failed as well to detect there was a problem.
The issue was discovered in April by the Finance Department. If payroll had not been moved from Human Resources to the Finance Department, the problem could still be going on, Wood said.
However, in her letter, Ms. Guy said that even if Mrs. Tipton had missed something in sending the payroll to the bank that Finance Director Pam Holt would have realized that when she gave final approval, "had she either not forgotten to approve the transmission, or possibly, had not deliberately not approved the transmission."
Neither Wood nor Mrs. Holt responded to requests for comment.
Ms. Guy said in her letter that when she joined the county in 2003, payroll was being handled through the county Finance Department before it was moved to her department.
It remained there until April 2013, when it was returned to the Finance Department.
Ms. Guy said that during a July 2003 meeting with then finance director Norman Ricks and then county manager Lee Smith, she questioned some of the policies.
"I was told by Mr. Ricks that Pam Holt, as his assistant, was responsible for internal auditing and was in charge of setting up the GEMS (payroll) system," Ms. Guy wrote in her letter. "Therefore, when payroll moved under my oversight, we continued the same policies and processes put in place by Mrs. Holt, making changes when legislature and/or auditing requests dictated we do so.
"If I am to be held responsible for clerical errors to the point of termination, then Mrs. Holt should be held to the same fate. Failing to terminate Mrs. Holt will result in our adding an additional paragraph to our action."
In her letter, Ms. Guy said there is a pattern of other county employees who have committed offenses that either resulted in greater cost, or the threat of greater cost, to the county, but who were not fired.
"This supports my assertion that I have been targeted, defamed and harassed since 2012, and there are other employees who broke laws, policies and falsified documents and have been protected," she wrote.
She said those offenses include, but are not limited to, employees facilitating and in at least one instance, fabricating audits; receiving kickbacks; sexually harassing employees; mishandling an alleged workplace violence incident; and sabotaging the Ceridian payroll system.
During the period of controversy surrounding the payroll system, Ms. Guy said she and her family were harassed and threatened.
She said she also was accosted by two county EMS workers.
One has since given a recorded statement indicating it was her day off and that she had been instructed by her supervisor "to come and take part in the intimidation," Mrs. Guy said in the letter.
Mrs. Guy has been under scrutiny, and has been often the target of critical comments by some county commissioners, for more than two years following the failed implementation of the Ceridian pay plan.
Ceridian is successfully used across the U.S., parts of Canada and even in Wayne County, she wrote.
"The implementation issues here in Wayne County resulted from sabotage by certain individuals for their own personal agendas," she wrote.
Ms. Guy wrote that she reported all of the items to her supervisor, former county manager Lee Smith, and alleges that in some cases commissioners intervened to stop a procedure.
Ms. Guy wrote to Wood that she would have shared all of the information had he given her the opportunity to talk to him.
She said that she had been told Wood was too busy to meet with her. She wrote that she had tracked all of her phone calls and emails to Wood that either went unanswered or that were answered too late to be relevant.
She said she has received an "outpouring of support" from county employees and that a bipartisan group has asked her to consider running against Commissioner Joe Daughtery.