North Dakota Workforce Safety and Insurance

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The North Dakota Workforce Safety and Insurance office (WSI) is the state agency in North Dakota charged with managing the state's workers compensation system. The office falls under the jurisdiction of the executive branch of government. Management of the office is entrusted to a WSI Board of Directors, whose members are appointed by the governor.

[edit] Controversy

In 2006, the North Dakota State Auditor audited the WSI and found:

"WSI does not have an adequate procurement system."
"WSI has not established an adequate human resource management system."
"WSI management has not established adequate policies and procedures to provide appropriate leadership and accountability for the organization."^[1]

Upon reviewing the audit, a Burleigh County, North Dakota prosecutor elected to conduct an additional investigation. This investigation resulted in criminal charges against WSI executive director Sandy Blunt on two separate criminal charges:

Felony misapplication of entrusted funds.
Felony illegal use of confidential Department of Transportation information, relating to use of driver's license photos.

On April 24, 2007, the first set of charges against Blunt were dismissed.^[2] Prosecutor Cynthia Feland indicated that she would appeal this dismissal to the North Dakota Supreme Court. A hearing on the charge of illegal use of confidential information will take place in late August 2007.

Chad Nodland, a political blogger in North Dakota, filed an open records request with the WSI under North Dakota's open records legislation^[3] in August 2007 requesting copies of the documents that the WSI was supplying to the WSI's indicted executive director Blunt while he was on leave from his position pending resolution of the charges.^[4] Nodland was informed by the WSI that he would have to pay $25.00/hour for retrieval, review, redaction and photocopying of the documents that the WSI was supplying at an unknown cost factor to Blunt. Nodland argues that this raises questions of equity under North Dakota's open records laws:

Every minute WSI's management and staff spends being at Blunt's beck and call -- doing these huge tasks for free for him that all the rest of us have to pay for -- is public money taken out of the public coffers and used for the personal benefit of one of its criminally-charged employees. Every page of paper that's given to Blunt for free is money out of the pockets of the citizens of North Dakota. Every WSI IT person who spends hours burning copies of hard drives, audio clips and video clips is taking -- or being forced to take -- the money we pay for government services and handing those dollars over to Sandy Blunt.

Further controversy surrounds Nodland's involvement in WSI issues given that his wife, Jennifer S.N. Clark, serves as the legal counsel to the legislative committee that oversees WSI^[5]. In that position, Clark has near unlimited access to internal WSI documents as well as knowledge of the legislative committee's deliberations on the agency.

Nodland never disclosed this connection in any of his writings on the subject, nor did his wife discuss her connections to the committee even as he wrote scathing editorials about the people she worked for.