This draft op-ed was sent to the Dispatch, which acknowledged receipt but didn’t follow up in any
way. This isn’t surprising in the sense that Coingate was never that big an
issue in Columbus, but it’s somewhat puzzling in that the Dispatch was the only paper that really challenged what happened
with audit documents at the time. Well, time changes both owners and editors.
Coingate and Ohio’s
Memory Hole: Are Public Records Laws Meaningless?
A dozen years ago, Ohio’s headlines were dominated by
stories about “Coingate,” the supposedly failed coin fund investments made by
the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation (OBWC) with the politically-connected
Toledo coin expert and dealer, Tom Noe. The news was fed by press releases from
a group of Ohio agencies doing investigations:
the Auditor of State, the Attorney General, the Inspector General, and
the Lucas County Prosecutor’s Office as well as the OBWC.
The “Coingate” episode carried special electricity because
it affected partisan politics at a time of enormous tension. The bitterly
conteste
d 2004 presidential election, in which Ohio played a pivotal role, was
just finished. And the 2006 state elections, expected to be every bit as
bitterly fought, were just starting to heat up.
When historians review Ohio’s politics in the modern era,
they’re sure to see 2005-6 as a key time and they’re certain to want to explore
the impact of Coingate on the outcome.
However, they’d better not look to Ohio’s government
agencies for information. Everything important appears to have gone down Ohio’s
version of the document-burning “memory hole” described in Orwell’s 1984.
I’ve been researching a book about Coingate, and in January
of this year sent public records requests to three Ohio agencies that were at
the center of the Coingate investigation:
the Auditor of State (AOS), the Attorney General’s (AG) office, and the
office of the Inspector General (IG). In response, I got not one single
document.
The AOS and AG’s office both said that the records were too
old to keep and had been destroyed. I later learned that they had also sent
nothing relevant to the State Archives.
The IG’s office, which had only issued its final report in
2014, was more helpful and later responded to a broader request, but retained
nothing useful.
A request to the Lucas County Prosecutor’s Office,
responsible for indicting Noe, got no response at all.
The AOS was key to my search because of a remarkable
anomaly. In June of 2005 the AOS contracted with an external firm to do an
audit of the coin funds. The charge to the firm was to: identify all assets (including coins,
collectibles, investments); review all transactions for discrepancies; and
identify any discrepancy between the value of the funds’ assets and the initial
investment made by the OBWC.
However, when the audit was released, in February of 2006,
it ignored almost all of the original charge:
there was no identification of all assets, no review of all
transactions, and no information on valuation vs. initial investment. Also
ignored were coin fund affiliates in other states. The focus was limited to
only one budget category at one location:
coin inventories at Noe’s office in Maumee. And, although others
appeared to have made very much the same kinds of transactions as those for
which Noe was indicted, only he was charged with theft.
How did this happen?
Refocusing the audit didn’t occur because of a hallway
conversation with the external auditor. Big firms are too responsible to work that way. There were documents.
Unique among the media, the Columbus Dispatch was suspicious of the special audit’s massive
and covert change of direction and asked the AOS for files. That agency,
employing a little known state law, refused.
Back then, state agency leaders bragged about how they were
doing wonderful public service in pursuing Coingate, applauding when Noe was
charged with theft and racketeering (RICO) and sent to prison for 18 years
without parole, prompting longtime Cincinnati-area prosecutor Joeseph Deters
to say, “I have murderers and
rapists who do less time than this…We’d probably have put him in diversion in
Hamilton County.”
Then, when he was safely away and the appeals were over,
agencies apparently destroyed the documents explaining how the audit was
refocused to target just one person, and why transactions substantially similar
to Noe’s case weren’t treated as criminal.
If they were really proud of what they’d done and not
looking to cover their tracks, these agencies would have preserved all the
records – above and beyond what the law requires – and we’d be able to
understand Coingate’s legal origami. Instead, future historians and legal
scholars wanting key documents will have to go look down the memory hole.