Jacqueline Heyman, a former lawyer with the Kentucky Public Protection Cabinet, filed a suit against the agency November 9, claiming she was fired after she discovered some of her co-workers running their own businesses within office hours and falsifying their payroll timesheets.
Heyman, previously an assistant general counsel for the agency’s Insurance Division in Frankfort, told her supervisor then that two clerical workers abused their positions by using “office computers and other resources belonging to the Commonwealth” to conduct businesses of their own, even during the agency’s operational hours.
One of her former co-workers, she alleged, sold products for an adult toy store. Another ran a mail-order business, and allegedly had an affair with the general counsel, according to Heyman.
She told all this to her supervisor, and also shared her suspicions that there was widespread fabrication of payroll timesheets by some employees.
She said the supervisor’s response was to fire her on August 31 without explanation. Heyman asserted that she was fired for reporting the alleged misconducts. Shane Sidebottom, her lawyer, said that such an action is a violation of the state’s whistleblower law.
Kentucky’s Public Protection Cabinet is an agency that serves to protect the interests of consumers, overseeing a large number of industries such as banking, insurance, construction, horse-racing, and even alcoholic beverage sales.
Heyman is pursuing a jury trial for unspecified damages and legal costs. Dick Brown, a spokesman for the Public Protection Cabinet, said that the agency only recently received the complaint, and has yet to offer a comment.
She discussed the allegations of office misconduct with the Kentucky Executive Branch Ethics Commission on August 20. While, as of this writing, the Ethics Commission has yet to reveal if it would investigate the matter, a spokeswoman said that the agency would issue an initiating order that will be made public should it determine the case worth pursuing.
