A CPA in Redmond, Washington is receiving $500,000 from the state’s board of accountancy after battling with them for nearly five years over a disciplinary action that probably should have been NBD.
D. Edson Clark had claimed that the state Board of Accountancy was improperly pursuing unwarranted charges against him in retaliation for complaints he had made about the handling of another case. He requested tens of thousands of pages of public records and launched seven lawsuits against board employees over the past two years.
Clark was very determined to clear his good name. So much so that the Board of Accountancy claimed, “it has been disrupted by Clark’s requests, and that his demands for public records are burning up its budget and limiting its ability to function.” Apparently, the Board was so overwhelmed that it threatened Clark with an anti-harassment complaint because the volume of emails he was sending was disruptive.
This brings up some questions: A) How many emails does it take to disrupt an office? B) Did they try hiring a temp? C) Was Clark spending his entire day copying and pasting the same email over and over or was he drafting individually scathing rants? D) At what point does a person cross the line of crazy-ass obsession?
Despite the metric asston of emails received by the Board, a judge in one of Clark’s lawsuits was not impressed with the Board’s handling of the situation:
In an oral hearing in June, Judge Thomas McPhee, a judge in Thurston County Superior Court, said that the board had “developed a pattern of incompetence in answering these discovery requests that is just difficult to believe for a state agency.”
We’re all familiar with governments’ inability to do much of anything but for a judge to put the situation in this context might be a new low for bureaucratic inefficiency.
Don’t worry though, the saga isn’t over as Mr. Clark has indicated that he plans further litigation in order to FULLY EXONERATE himself. Nevermind that the $500,000 is over a third of the Board’s budget. This is obviously personal. We admire the gusto.
Redmond CPA to get $500K settlement from state board [Puget Sound Business Journal]
Redmond accountant, Washington regulator at odds [Puget Sound Business Journal]