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Audit: Ohio Halfway House Officials Spent $20,000 in State Money on Alcohol and Strip Clubs

photo of Dave Yost
STATEHOUSE NEWS BUREAU
Ohio Auditor Dave Yost (pictured) compared the situation to "frat boys" using someone else's credit card.

An audit of a Southern Ohio correctional facility has found 11 directors and employees used conferences as a way to cover self-indulgent expenditures.

Auditor Dave Yost says the employees of the STAR Community Justice Center in Scioto County forged some transactions and spent more than $20,000 on out-of-state trips and bar tabs in 2013.

“It’s like frat boys with somebody else’s credit cards. There’s no instance in which you use tax money to buy beers, much less 44 beers. There’s no instance in which it is OK to use a public credit card to charge the taxpayers for a trip to a strip club. This is just egregious.”

The director of the facility at the time was fired in 2015. 

Jo Ingles is a professional journalist who covers politics and Ohio government for the Ohio Public Radio and Television for the Ohio Public Radio and Television Statehouse News Bureau. She reports on issues of importance to Ohioans including education, legislation, politics, and life and death issues such as capital punishment. Jo started her career in Louisville, Kentucky in the mid 80’s when she helped produce a televised presidential debate for ABC News, worked for a creative services company and served as a general assignment report for a commercial radio station. In 1989, she returned back to her native Ohio to work at the WOSU Stations in Columbus where she began a long resume in public radio.