City fines teacher $10K for conflict of interest, "other conduct"

A $35 business proposition — among other offenses — cost a city teacher $10,000.

Fay Inovlotska paid two students $35 earlier this year to hand out flyers promoting a daycare center with which she was associated, according to a report today from the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board. That behavior violated rules prohibiting city employees from using their positions for personal gain, COIB concluded.

Inovlotska — who earned just over $80,000 from the city last year, according to payroll data collected by the transparency website SeeThroughNY — agreed to pay a $10,000 fine to the Department of Education for the behavior “and other conduct,” according to COIB’s press release.

Exactly what the other conduct was isn’t specified in COIB’s announcement. But Inovlotska’s case came to COIB from the office of Special Commissioner of Investigation Richard Condon, who looks into allegations of fraud and corruption in the DOE. Condon publicizes only a fraction of SCI’s reports, even when allegations are substantiated.

The only way to see unpublicized reports that Condon has forwarded to the DOE or to the ethics board is to file a Freedom of Information Law request, which we have done.

SCI has published just seven investigation reports this year, down from 15 in 2010, 12 in 2009, 19 in 2008, and a high of 26 in 2007. The 26 reports released in 2007 reflected just 8 percent of all of the allegations that Condon’s office substantiated.

Another SCI report, released in May, documented how the DOE’s former chief financial officer, George Raab, used his city email account to discuss investments and line up a new job in the private sector. COIB announced yesterday that Raab had agreed to pay a $6,500 fine in that case.