The employee at the school’s Price campus was supposed to oversee programs for local businesses. Instead, he failed to show up and was paid more than $157,000 in salary and benefits.
At least one of those alerts came to administrators as early as March 2022 — seven months into Agner’s time there — according to a trove of emails shared with The Salt Lake Tribune by multiple USU employees, former employees and affiliates. The Tribune also requested the findings of a separate HR investigation done by USU; that document included names and can be matched up with the audit to create a picture of what happened. Several current and former employees also shared a printed copy of the unredacted review with the newspaper, along with other communications about what they refer to as “the shadow employee” situation.
A department head at USU Eastern responded: “I am happy to do whatever is necessary” to keep Agner employed — even if that meant moving Agner to another department so he would stay on the payroll without drawing more attention. At this point, USU says “there is not a clear path” to reclaim the misappropriated salary and benefits paid out to him. The school’s spokesperson said the university has moved money around to cover the lost funds.
Finnerty did not respond to a request for comment from The Tribune on this story, nor did Doug Miller, who is the chief campus administrator for all of USU Eastern. In an attempt to fill in the blanks, the auditors reviewed Agner’s email account, talked to other employees and looked at the databases Agner was supposed to fill out to track which businesses he was working with.
Additionally, each year that Agner was in charge of the Custom Fit program, there were significant funds — more than 25% of the total budget each year — left over. Custom Fit dollars are, ideally, all to be given out annually without any carry over, according to the guidance from the Utah System of Higher Education.according to Transparent Utah.
“An employee believed the SBDC specialist was getting paid without working because of his relationship with the associate department head and department head” of technical education, the audit reported., who reported to Cano and became Agner’s direct supervisor. That means the reporting chain went down from Warnick to Cano to Migliori to Agner — leaving Migliori the only person in the administration separating Cano and Agner.
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