A D.C. government employee, after serving on a committee that told a city agency it should hire a consultant, quit her job and within seven months got a $97,515 contract to perform the recommended work.
Several D.C. Council members have questioned whether the contract award was appropriate, and the chairman of the council's contracting committee has asked his staff to review the case.
Lisa Morgan worked in the city's technology office last year and served on the 49-member steering committee that studied problems at the D.C. Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs and, among dozens of recommendations, suggested that it hire a consultant to study its customer service operations.
In September 2004, while the committee was in the middle of its work, Morgan established a consulting firm called Simple Solutions. She left her government job in December, after the committee had made its recommendations, and in July, her firm received the contract with Consumer and Regulatory Affairs.
Another company submitted a bid for the two-month contract that was $30,000 lower than the one submitted by Simple Solutions. But a DCRA official recommended Morgan's firm based on her work on the steering committee and her experience as director of customer service operations for the city administrator from 2000 to 2002.
Morgan said her decision to leave city government and start Simple Solutions had nothing to do with her involvement on the steering committee. She noted that before joining D.C. government in 1997, she had been employed at a national consulting firm that did work for states, counties and municipalities.
"I would not need to have a contract based on friendships," Morgan said. "I have skills. . . . I did very good work in government. Given my track record, [the contract] makes a lot of sense, if it's awarded fairly."
City officials said the contract with Morgan does not appear to violate the District's conflict-of-interest law, which prohibits former city employees from communicating with their former agencies as contractors or lobbyists for a period that ranges from one to two years, depending on the jobs they held. Morgan never worked for the DCRA.
But council member Adrian M. Fenty (D-Ward 4), who serves on the council committees that oversee the DCRA and contracting, said the contract "certainly is a violation of the spirit" of the law.
"You should not participate in the decision-making of government and then benefit personally from that decision in a short turnaround," Fenty said. "That's a type of coziness that the old D.C. government used to practice and the residents feel is borderline corruption."
Council member Vincent B. Orange Sr. (D-Ward 5), chairman of the contracting committee, said his staff members will review the law "to make sure everything is appropriate" in the Morgan case. He questioned why Simple Solutions did not provide training for DCRA employees, as the contract had called for. An agency official said the company did not fulfill the training component of the agreement because of time constraints.
Morgan joined D.C. government as a senior policy analyst for the chief financial officer, making $65,594 a year. When she left in December, she was director for special projects for the technology office, earning $117,987 a year.
