The former Ontario city auditor is alleging that action the city took in deadending an audit/investigation into some questionable expenditures of public funds by one of the city’s line employees belies other even more serious diversions and misappropriations potentially implicating those all the way to the top of the municipal organization.
Brad Neumann, who had risen to the post of city auditor, in 2023 learned from a tip provided by an unidentified city employee through the city’s “EthicsPoint hotline,” a forum for whistleblowers to anonymously inform city administrators of issues impacting the city, that there were anomalies in some purchases made by the city, which the unknown employee indicated might have involved bribery and/or kickbacks being exchanged for a city contract. In discussing the matter, which had been given the nomenclature “Case 44,” with Jordan Villwock, who was then the city’s director of management services, Neumann indicated that he was opening an audit of the expenditures and the staff member[s] involved in Case 44. As management services director, Villwock oversaw the city’s Innovation, Performance Management and Audit Department, and was Neumann’s immediate supervisor. Villwock reacted to Neumann’s expression of interest in Case 44 by telling Neumann that the staff member who was most logically the focus of the audit was “a good guy” and that he did not believe or expect that anything would come of the investigation.
According to Neumann, Villwock thereafter requested that Neumann hold off on the investigation until Michael Heider, the chief investigator for the city’s human resources department, contacted him.
After a decent interval, Neumann had not heard from Heider, and began inquiries up the city’s administrative chain of command. Neumann, sensing he was being discouraged from pursuing the issue, persisted with his inquiries, learning that no substantive investigation into the matter was underway.
Eventually, on November 30, 2023, according to Neumann, he was presented with a copy of the “whistleblower report” into the allegations received via the hotline. The report revealed that no substantive investigation had been carried out and that what action had been taken had violated the basic auditing principles that would normally accompany any such inquiries. Neumann at that point moved ahead with the audit he had suspended when, pending action by or an investigation being done through the human resources division, Villwock had ordered him to hold off.
Case 44 involved a considerable about of money. Whereas a previous vendor had the contract in question for $24,000, a revamped version of the contract was providing another vendor that had taken the place of the first vendor with $6 million.
In early December, Villwock, who at that point considered the matter off limits to Neumann, learned that Neumann was continuing with the audit. On December 11, 2023, Neumann and Villwock came to loggerheads over Neumann’s continue pursuit of the audit. Neumann sought but was unsuccessful in convincing Villwock that the integrity of the audit was being compromised. Villwock rejected Neumann’s suggestion that the City of Ontario’s policy of giving city administrators oversight of the auditing process violates the principle of impartiality that is inherent in the outside ethical guidelines adhered to by professional auditors, and he ordered that Neumann and the Innovation, Performance Management and Audit Department stand down with regard to the investigation.
On December 12, Neumann resurrected the investigation into Case 44 and inserted himself back into it, contacting Heider about the matter and sending several text messages to city employees making inquiries and requesting investigative information regarding the matter, questioning the Ontario Police Department’s involvement and performance with regard to an investigation of the case facts, and asserting that he should be included as a participant in any meetings about the case and be kept abreast of or be involved in any future investigative action relating to the case. He then sent a follow-up text to Heider, stating that based upon his examination of the known facts available to that point, he believed a full-blow investigation was warranted.
When Villwock learned of those communications from Villwock, he interpreted what Neumann had done as insubordination, based on his previous day’s directive to him to drop the audit of the matters relating to Case 44.
That same day, December 12, 2023, in a meeting with Neumann, Villwock placed Neumann on administrative leave, citing insubordination and inadequacies in Neumann’s performance in the role of city auditor.
Ultimately, the city terminated Neumann, citing five instances/allegations of insubordination and a single incident/allegation of dishonesty and exceeding authority. In firing Neumann, the city maintained that even though Neumann acknowledged and agreed with Villwock’s instructions, he routinely did not follow them, ignored them or defied them by doing the opposite of what he had been told. Neumann, according to the city, did not do an adequate job of training, mentoring and “onboarding” Danesh Lakhani, a newly hired internal auditor; had done an inadequate job of preparing the city’s immersion in an event, Fraud Week; was disruptive during audit committee meetings; was assuming in his role as city auditor authority that his position did not confer on him and was performing functions, in the words of one review of his work, that were “out of his lane”; had retained control over an internal audit of benefits being provided to city employees that Villwock wanted delegated to Lakhani; defied Villwock with regard to the Case 44 audit; had allowed a former employee, his predecessor as city auditor, to access a secure area of City Hall; and had, without explicit authorization, prepared an online survey requesting suggestions from the public regarding the team name of the minor league baseball team that is to take up residence in Ontario’s baseball stadium.
Since his termination, Neumann has posted to the internet materials and made appearances at city council meetings in which he has suggested that much is amiss at Ontario City Hall.
In his internet postings, Neumann has mounted, in a somewhat elliptical format, a narrative, consisting of documents he had access to while employed with the city, which gives a more complete sense to what he has been unable to say during the time-restricted presentations made to the council during their public meetings.
Neumann and others with whom he has become associated suggest that some of Ontario’s elected officials are on the take, in particular, the mayor and members of the city council. They point to the way it appears that principals or owners of businesses which have a lot of money riding on official decisions in Ontario, which in many cases involve votes by the mayor and city council, are paying those officials off, either through hefty campaign donations or outright bribes.
There has been tremendous stability on the Ontario City Council, with four of its five members – Mayor Paul Leon, Councilman Alan Wapner, Councilman Jim Bowman and Councilwoman Debra Dorst-Porada having remained in place for more than a decade-and-a-half. Wapner has been on the council for more than 30 years, since 1994. Leon was elected to the council in 1998 and became mayor in 2005. Bowman, who twice previously, in the 1980s and 1990s, served on the city council, has been on the council since 2006. Dorst-Porada has been a council member since 2008. All four have tapped into more than $7.6 million in donations, mostly from individuals or corporations with a financial interest in decisions to be made by the city council, during their time in office. The newest member of the council, Daisy Macias, came into office last year primarily on the strength of a $40,000 transfer of funds from Wapner’s political war chest to her electioneering fund, just as the 2024 campaign season was beginning.
The amount of money rolling in to Ontario’s politicians in exchange for the council’s votes to approve the donors’ development applications, their contracts with the city for the provision of goods or services and/or service franchises are widely perceived as political payoffs. There have been disturbing reports that money beyond political donations has changed hands between business interests in Ontario and Mayor Leon, who is the pastor of a church in Ontario, and Wapner, who operates a consulting business that specializes in government relations. No proof of those accusations has come to light and neither has ever been criminally charged with bribetaking.
Still the same, Ontario city staff, are the highest paid municipal employees in San Bernardino County and among the best paid city workers in the state. There are recurrent reports that the city’s higher ranking employees, in particular department heads and assistant department heads, functioning on a daily basis within this intensive pay-to-play atmosphere, are aware of what the mayor and the council are up to, and to buy their silence, the mayor and council have provided Ontario city employees with salaries and benefits that dwarf those of their counterparts in other cities.
There has been a substantial amount of profligate spending by the city and the exploitation of the city’s residents and taxpayers, which have been documented in multiple exposés. Attesting to the fashion in which money freely flows at Ontario City Hall is that the city budget exceeds the combined spending of the two cities with the next largest budgets in San Bernardino County – Rancho Cucamonga and Fontana – with more than a billion dollars running through Ontario’s various municipal funds on an annual basis.
Consequently, the Sentinel is informed, there are at least a handful of city employees who are engaged in side hustles. Neumann’s position as the city’s auditor brought one such side hustle – Case 44 – to his attention. When he attempted to have an investigation initiated into this, which he had tentatively concluded was a violation of the public trust, he was reined back by Villwock, who has since been promoted to assistant city manager by City Manager Scott Ochoa.
Essentially, according to Neumann, Villwock quashed the investigation he believed, in his capacity as city auditor, should be pursued to a logical conclusion. In doing this, according to Neumann, Villwock insisted that Neumann violate several auditing principles and protocols. When the matter escalated, according to Neumann, City Manager Ochoa backed Villwock.
After Neumann was put on administrative leave, the city constructively fired him.
The reason this was done, the best interpretation of Neumann’s narrative suggests, is that following through with the investigation Neumann was pushing for would most logically, if it were done correctly, have resulted in one or more city employees being disciplined or more likely terminated and potentially even prosecuted. This would have triggered the accused singing his head off about other lower-downs, in-betweens and higher-ups at City Hall who Neumann and others have come to be convinced are cutting ethical and legal corners or are on the hustle, which in turn would lead to revelations about a good number of others, including the mayor and some members of the city council being on the take, and the city manager, city attorney, police chief and other department heads looking the other way to ensure they can hang onto their lucrative positions.
At the October 15, 2024 Ontario City Council meeting, Neumann addressed the council, giving a a brief overview of a much deeper story than what he was permitted to cover in the limited time of two minutes he was allotted to address the council. Neumann told the council, “Jordan Villwock ordered me to violate the public’s trust. The City of Ontario is actively engaged in retaliation against me because as city auditor, I was ordered by Scott Ochoa’s executives to violate the public’s trust. Five hours after I notified the internal audit committee… they fired me. They put me on paid administrative leave and walked me out of the city. It is incumbent upon me, the former city auditor, to inform you that you need to fire Scott Ochoa and his subordinates who engaged very clearly in retaliation against a civil servant.”
Immediate after Neumann’s comments that night, Mayor Leon said that he wanted to set the record straight, but that because of the restrictions of the Brown Act, California’s open public meeting law, he and other city officials could not at that point respond because for a discussion to take place, the subject matter to be discussed in the forum of a council meeting has to be placed on the agenda for the city council meeting 72 hours in advance.
In his remarks in reaction to Neumann given on October 15, 2024, Mayor Leon implied that there was no substance, essentially, to what Neumann had said, but that the council was not at liberty to say that under that evening’s circumstances.
The Sentinel this week offered Leon an opportunity to speak to the accusations swirling around the city as a consequence of Neumann’s termination. The Sentinel extended to Leon questions relating to:
• Why the investigation Neumann wanted to undertake pertaining to Case 44 was not pursued;
• If what Neumann claimed about being hamstrung in wanting to pursue that investigation was true;
• Whether Neumann was ordered to violate standard auditing principles by compromising the substance of the audit he was carrying out up the chain of command;
• Whether Neumann had been given a choice, as he claimed, between on one hand doing what he knew to be wrong and violating auditing protocol and allowing Ontario’s taxpayers to be victimized in order to keep his job and on the other hand doing what he knew to be right by following the proper auditing protocol and seeking to protect the city’s taxpayers and thereby getting fired;
• Whether Leon and the city council had looked at the grounds cited for Mr Neumann’s termination;
• Whether Leon and the council considered the reasons provided for firing Neumann valid;
• Whether Neumann was terminated because in his approach he was on the verge of exposing a wider pattern of wrongdoing at City Hall;
• Whether Leon and the council are aware of side hustles among city employees going on in which those employees are violating the public trust to enrich themselves;
• How, if such side hustles are not ongoing, Leon and the council explicate Neumann’s contention that there is strong evidence to suggest they are taking place;
• If Leon and the council could cogently and convincingly refute Neumann’s contention that city officials fear a series of revelations going right up the chain of command all the way to the mayor’s office if some of the side hustles being carried out by lower-downs at City Hall were to be exposed.
In response, Leon told the Sentinel, “This is not an issue I will spend time on. If he thinks I’m on the take, call the DA or prove it or stop talking. To engage with this would be swinging at pitches in the dirt. I won’t dignify his remarks with a response.”
Leon said that those who know him “would never say that crap about me because they know me. He doesn’t.”
The Sentinel today emailed Villwock, seeking from him reaction to Neumann’s claim that Villwock had short-circuited the inquiry/audit/investigation with regard to Case 44. The Sentinel asked Villwock if it was true that he expressed doubt about the guilt of the target of the Case 44 audit/investigation even before the inquiry had begun and, if so, if he could explain the basis for his belief that the Case 44 circumstance did not cross into the province of any overt wrongdoing. The Sentinel asked Villwock directly whether he had in any way obstructed or prevented Neumann’s audit from proceeding. The Sentinel asked if Villwock had made a decision not to take the investigation/audit any further than the cursory examination that Neumann managed to carry out and, if that were so, why that decision was made. The Sentinel asked Villwock if he could supply a cogent and convincing refutation of Neumann’s assertions that he was thwarted in his effort to get to the bottom of the circumstance regarding Case 44 and that Villwock, as his supervisor with the City of Ontario, had forced Neumann to violate the principles and protocols that auditors are supposed to function under in carrying out their work.
Villwock did not, in the limited time between the Sentinel’s submission of the questions and the Sentinel’s deadline, respond.