The recent arrest of Medora Superintendent Andrew Day raises an interesting question.
Day’s arrest, however, on two counts of ghost employment raises an interesting question. What exactly is ghost employment? I had to look it up myself. That’s in part because my image of ghost employment involved someone getting paid for not doing a job.
State statutue defines ghost employment as a public servant who knowingly or intentionally hires an employee for the governmental entity that he or she serves and fails to assign to the employee any duties, or assigns to the employee any duties not related to the operation of the governmental entity or a public servant who knowingly or intentionally assigns to an employee under his supervision any duties not related to the operation of the governmental entity that he serves.
I’ve been covering the police beat for the better part of 15 years now, and I can’t remember another time when someone has been charged with ghost employment during those years. Ghost employment is something you use to hear a lot more about back in the days when the patronage system was in effective in local and state government. In those days, public officials could and often did hire family members to work for them, and that led to some terrible abuses of the system. It’s good those day are gone.
I’m not making any judgment about whether or not Day is guilty. That’s for a court to decide.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.