A State Bureau of Investigations probe is looking into possible wrongdoing on the part of a pair of former Southwestern Community College employees.
Last week, investigators visited the college, search warrant in hand, to look for evidence that Christy Deaver, 40, who until Oct. 5 served as SCC’s director of student records, had abused her position to get her student loan payments deferred.
People with outstanding student loans can put off payment and interest of those loans by enrolling in at least six credit hours of coursework. After launching their own internal investigation, SCC officials found that Deaver “had (allegedly) used her position to enroll herself into Southwestern Community College courses and then withdraw from those courses in an attempt to defer repayments of her student loan(s),” according to a search warrant.
Deaver wasn’t the only one at which the finger of suspicion pointed during the course of SCC’s investigation. The school found evidence that Fairley Pollock, 38, who resigned her position June 5 to take a job at Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College, may have been engaged in the alleged enroll-withdraw routine, as well as Deaver’s husband Ricky Deaver, 42, who did not work for the school.
The SCC investigation concluded in October. Deaver resigned her position on Oct. 5, citing “personal reasons.” On Oct. 14, Cliff Statler, SCC’s vice president for finance and administrative services, notified SBI of the school’s findings, as state law requires when there’s a possible crime involving state property.
In North Carolina, it’s illegal to use a government computer to “devise or execute any scheme or artifice to defraud” or to “obtain property or service by means of false or fraudulent pretenses.” It’s this crime — accessing government computers — that the SBI is investigating, though no charges have yet been filed.
Pollock and Deaver had both been longtime employees of SCC, with Deaver starting work at the college in 1997 and Pollock in 2005. Now director of educational partnerships at AB Tech, Pollock has not seen any change in employment status since starting work there this summer, according to AB Tech’s communications director Kerri Glover. The college has no comment to offer on the investigation, Glover said.
Tyler Goode, spokesman for SCC, also declined to comment on the school’s behalf except to say that SCC is fully cooperating with the investigation.
After filing the search warrant, the SBI investigators seized a slew of documents — including accounts receivable records, federal loan servicer history and enrollment records, for starters — pertaining to Ricky Deaver, Christy Deaver and Pollock.
Neither Christy Deaver nor Pollock had responded to requests for comment as of press time.