Isu Arena Director Suspended

Only six weeks after he was hired, Idaho State University’s Holt Arena manager has been suspended with pay while the school looks into fraud charges.

Jim Scott resigned as director of the Ashville, N.C., Civic Center in February, two months before he and two other employees were charged with fraudulently obtaining bonuses that totalled $1,600 of the city’s money. The case is still pending.

Although the story appeared at least six times in the Ashville Citizen-Times from Feb. 5 to April 5, Idaho State’s nine-member search committee never heard about it.

“We just heard glowing things about the guy,” committee chair Mike Thomas said. “We heard that the Ashville auditorium had a $300,000 deficit, and he turned it around in three years.”

In 1994, Scott was hired under a city mandate to bail out the facility. In 1995, he received a bonus of about $20,000 for reducing the losses at the center.

But on April 1, 1998, Scott and two others were charged with withholding about $7,000 in state taxes, which they allegedly put in a Civic Center account to make the facility look more profitable.

“I really don’t have anything to say,” Scott responded Wednesday.

Idaho State President Richard Bowen said the oversight on Scott’s background check high-lights a flaw in the traditional search process, where former or current employers may be too leery of a lawsuit to be totally forthright.

“We’re going to do a literal investigation of people going into the more responsible positions,” Bowen said.