Baltimore Radio: Non-Com WEAA Accused Of Padding Funding

Fired last year from Morgan State University, the school’s former director of broadcast operations claims in court that the school has been misreporting its operating expenses for years to pad its funding.

Accord got the Courthouse News Service, Michele Williams filed the April 26 complaint in Baltimore City Circuit Court with help from attorneys Daniel Kenney and Morris Fischer. She says Morgan State hired her in 2014, and that one of her duties as director of broadcast operations included investigating and certifying the audited financial statements
that Morgan State submitted to the federal Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Michelle Williams

“If Morgan State University shows a certain levels of operating expenditures to CPB – then Morgan State becomes eligible for a certain level of federal funds through CPB’s grant program,” the complaint states.

Williams says trouble arose in late 2016, however, when she noticed the university had since 2014 been telling state officials and the CPB that the school’s radio station “WEAA had operating expenses of around $1,000,000 more than its actual expenses.”

Williams says she made repeated complaints about her findings and refused to sign off on what she believed was a $1 million variance in the 2016 numbers.

Williams emphasizes that her “termination coincided with the university’s 2016 fiscal year financial statement deadlines so as to exclude plaintiff from the process of creating and submitting financial statements to the state of Maryland and to CPB.”

Williams paired her wrongful-termination allegations with one count of defamation, saying the dean “falsely and publicly accused plaintiff of making expenditures within the radio station that were not actually made – which led plaintiff to ultimately be terminated.”

The complaint seeks punitive damages, lost wages and an injunction, among other relief.