Lobbyist’s job was no-show, state says

Position bumped up McDonough pension

June 21, 2011|By Andrea Estes, Globe Staff

Richard McDonough was director of public affairs and government relations… (ARAM BOGHOSIAN FOR THE GLOBE )

Lobbyist Richard W. McDonough was making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, but according to the state’s inspector general, he wanted more.

So McDonough arranged for a client to give him a no-show, no-work job on a public payroll, allowing him to get medical benefits and a state pension he was not entitled to, said Inspector General Gregory W. Sullivan.

“It was literally a no-show job,’’ Sullivan wrote yesterday to the State Board of Retirement. “Mr. McDonough’s purported full-time employment at this public agency is a sham.’’ His pension defrauds the state retirement system, Sullivan said.

He asked the Retirement Board to review the $31,000-a-year lifetime pension, which McDonough started collecting in 2008 as the Globe was scrutinizing his involvement in a questionable effort to steer multimillion-dollar state contracts to a Burlington software firm in exchange for cash. He was convicted last week on federal conspiracy and fraud charges with his friend, former House Speaker Salvatore F. DiMasi, for his efforts on behalf of Cognos.

To qualify for the pension, McDonough had a lobbying client, the Merrimack Education Center of Chelmsford, put him on the payroll of a related organization, the Merrimack Education Collaborative, which provides education and treatment services for special-needs students from 10 school districts.

McDonough was described in internal records as the Education Collaborative’s director of public affairs and government relations from 2003 to 2008. But virtually no one knew McDonough was on the payroll, not the co-executive directors nor any of the employees. He had no desk, no phone, and no work product, according to Sullivan.

The job appears to be a paperwork maneuver that allowed McDonough to receive public benefits while remaining a private lobbyist. He collected the same lobbying fees as before, but the Education Collaborative classified the payments as an employee’s salary so that they counted toward increasing McDonough’s pension.

Only the former executive director, John Barranco, who put McDonough on the payroll, seemed to know about the arrangement. Barranco refused to be interviewed by Sullivan’s investigators. He did not return calls yesterday from the Globe.

McDonough’s lawyer, Thomas Drechsler, said yesterday that his client did nothing illegal or improper.

“To the extent anyone is making such allegations, he vehemently denies them,’’ Drechsler said. “I want to remind people that the inspector general has never contacted him to hear his side of the story. They’ve never given him the opportunity to speak with them. I wonder about the quality of the investigatory process.’’