IWD calls its 2020 fix "enhanced monitoring." The fraud went on.

For seven years, Iowa's federal job-training program for youth, adults, and displaced workers sent $436,180 in improper and unsupported reimbursements to the woman running it and her family, a special investigation by the Iowa Auditor of State⧉ found.▸ It was caught only when a coworker filling in during her vacation noticed a car-repair reimbursement for a participant who didn't own a car.

Iowa Workforce Development (IWD) passes federal Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act money down through regional boards to local operators; in central Iowa, the Central Iowa Workforce Development Board contracted the Youth, Adult, and Dislocated Worker programs to Children and Families of Iowa (CFI)⧉.▸ CFI hired Jodi Spargur-Tate as WIOA Title I Program Director on April 1, 2015, giving her authority over program budgets, expense approvals, and her own reimbursement requests alike -- three duties a basic segregation-of-duties control is supposed to split among different people.

Auditors reviewed 802 reimbursement requests Spargur-Tate submitted over those seven years, totaling $419,895.19, and found 256 of them -- $324,586.53 -- improper, plus another 38 unsupported by any documentation at all.▸ Sixty-seven of the improper reimbursements, worth $124,002.61, were backed by nothing more than a printed screenshot of an Amazon shopping cart⧉ -- a page that shows an order total, not proof anything was ever paid for. All told, roughly 80 cents of every dollar CFI paid her directly turned out to be improper or unsupported.

The remaining money moved through four vendors.▸ CFI paid $77,730 to Dee Dee Millard, a relative of Spargur-Tate, for daycare services -- though Millard wasn't a registered daycare provider and none of the participants named on the checks were eligible for daycare under their career plans. It paid $10,014 to U.S. Cellular for Spargur-Tate's and her family's personal phones, on top of a cell-phone stipend she already received through payroll. It paid $8,340 in rent to Dickerson Rentals LLC for an apartment used by Spargur-Tate's son and his family⧉ -- eleven payments spanning April 2019 to April 27, 2022. And it paid $6,167 directly on Mid American Energy utility accounts held in Spargur-Tate's and family members' names.

Iowa Workforce Development did not dispute the auditor's dollar figures.▸ It disputed the timeline. Responding to the report, IWD said it had already addressed the weakness years earlier: "IWD implemented enhanced sub-recipient monitoring beginning in January 2020."⧉ The audit's own dates say otherwise: the last of the Dickerson Rentals payments -- WIOA funds, for a family member who was never an eligible program participant -- is dated April 27, 2022, more than two years after IWD says its fix was in place.

The report's own conclusion is blunter than either side's public statement.▸ Auditors found that subrecipient-monitoring problems with this exact program had already turned up in IWD's Report of Recommendations or the State's Single Audit for five of the last six years audited⧉ before this case ever surfaced. In its own formal response inside the report, IWD called the result "a significant breakdown in internal controls that allowed fraudulent activities to occur over an extended period of time." Copies of the report were filed with the Polk County Sheriff's Office, the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation, the Polk County Attorney's Office, and the Iowa Attorney General's Office⧉; the report does not say what came of any of those referrals.