I see that Phil said that some other employee sent it to him on their own volition. I was mostly joking about it being sent by a disgruntled employee, but maybe I wasn’t so far off.

I suspect that, in the end, the amount of the ethics complaints (which is the real issue..the records requests are a red herring to pump up the numbers) that it will come out to be pretty close to the $300,000 that the personnel board released.

It may even end up being $500,000 because there may be items on the spreadsheet that are legit in terms of ethics complaints, but it’s not anywhere near the 2 million mark, which has already been proven beyond a doubt, in my mind (and I think many others).

I still am not convinced that the release of page 2 wasn’t accidental and it was meant just for “internal” use for the purposes of filling out page 1.

If you look at page 1 without benefit of page 2 there are far less discrepancies that are easily pointed out. Since they went to the obvious trouble of making sure the totals were close to Palin’s 2 million mark, it seems self-defeating to then give enough information (in the way of page 2) to debunk the number fairly easily.

On the other hand, maybe whoever was in charge of sending out the document has had enough of the soon-to-be-ex-Gov’s antics and decided to help out the jammie wearing bloggers

So check it out: I just posted it: Count me once, count me twice: Creative accounting on Palin’s spreadsheet.

If I made any errors, please explain in comments on that post: I won’t be in a position to fix ‘em until I get back from Spokane late Monday night.

It’s not that the page 2 numbers appear on page 1 that makes it double dipping; it’s that the same numbers from page 2 appear on page 1 twice: First, the whole total from page 2 is transferred to page 1 as “Department of Law – Ethics sub-total of $41,574;” then, many of the same numbers appear again as separate items adding up to a sub-total of $26,849 under “ethics complaints” on page 1. The same numbers ARE added in twice.

AKMFan, this is just meant to clarify, not criticize. I appreciate your addition to Mel’s work; and, of course, I appreciate the voluminous effort she put in creating it.

After some consideration, I don’t think that the page 2 numbers being on page 1 are “double dipping” per se. I think they either released page 2 accidentally and it was only meant to give a breakdown for them to put in the spreadsheet, but not for the public to see or they are using it to justify the $$ in page 1 (not adding them both together).

That being said, the billable hours weren’t carried over even remotely correctly.

Page 2 looks legit to me, in terms, of a document used for billable attorney hours (I have some experience with that) and based on the numbers, that I checked, being consistent at $121.97 for the attorney listed, I’m willing to bet that the information on that document is (fairly) accurate.

If we take that document as accurate, it shows a couple things. First, it shows that really it’s not lots of attorneys working tirelessly, while being inundated with frivolous ethics complaints.

The same attorney is listed for all of the ethics complaints. An attorney, that isn’t on the only organizational chart I have been able to find of the DoL, by the way.

One complaint lists Bockmon and Jones, but there is not a breakdown of how much time each person put in on that particular case and the total time on that case (travelgate) is only 2.9 hours for a total of $98. Interesting that one of the complaints that resulted in her paying back $$ to the State only cost $98, no?

****added when proof-reading original post*****
Another thing to note is that if we use the $121.97 as being Bockmon’s normal salary amount that (s)he must not have put too much time in on the case since the amount listed for 2.9 hours isn’t even a full hour of his/her salary.

Ah..I just found further curiosities when double checking my post here. Jones, the other attorney listed on the Travelgate complaint is listed separately under another item further down.

A quick use of the calculator shows that Jones also makes $121.97/hour.

Now, I’m forced to say that I no longer am sure about the initial (fairly) accurate statement in my post here. If they both get $121.97/hour then no matter who is doing the work or how much time each put in on Travelgate, the total should be $353.71.

******end addition******

So we basically have 1 guy or gal working on the ethics complaints. If we take it at it’s face value that a total of 331.2 hours were billable (that include 3 attorneys total, but the others were negligible in terms of hours spent) that works out to around a shade over 8 weeks worth of work. There is no time frame on the DoL printout, but Troopergate was August, 08, I think, and it does say through 6/24/09 on page 1, so in a bit less than a year ONE person put in 8 weeks worth of work on 15 cases.

One other thought off the top of my head, somewhere I read that it was 1600 attorney hours spent on this stuff…yet the DoL says it was 331.2. That’s a pretty big difference. Kinda like the difference between $300,000 and $2,000,000

Thanks very much for that info, Mark. The more the Palin spreadsheet is looked at, the more problems become apparent. I’m hearing the ADN may be posting a copy, hopefully tonight, maybe even a 2nd story that digs a bit more into the numbers, including (I hope) the kind of info you just provided. Really helps to have someone like you knowledgeable about law practice taking a look at this. The double-count of DOL ethics figures is also a big concern I hope will get more coverage.

I don’t think so.

Mark Regan
Attorney
Fairbanks