Opinion ID: 774990
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The DOT Searches

Text: 13 Lawrence Knapek, the Assistant Commissioner of the DOT for the Office of Budget and Finance, met with John Samaniuk, the acting director of the Office of Internal Audit and Investigations, and Gary Cuyler, the chief investigator for that office, to discuss how to respond to the allegations made in the letter. They decided that the Office of Internal Audit and Investigation would conduct an investigation employing such techniques as reviewing telephone records, reviewing computer records, Internet logs, that kind of thing. A computer review was ordered for all of the employees who could be identified from the letter. This involved printing out a list of file names found on these DOT computers to determine whether any contained non-standard software. After business hours on October 25, 1996, the investigators entered Leventhal's office through an open door, turned on his DOT computer, and reviewed the directories of files on the computer's hard drive. There was no power-on password to gain access to Leventhal's computer, but once the machine was turned on, some of the menu selections that appeared were password-protected. In order to perform their search, the investigators may have used a boot-disk, a disk which allows the computer to start up without encountering the menus normally found there. 14 Having located the computer directories, the investigators printed out a list of the file names to enable the later identification of the programs loaded on Leventhal's computer without having to open each program. This included a printout of the names of the hidden files on Leventhal's computer. These hidden directories, the investigators found, contained Morph, a type of drawing program and PPU, a program suspected of containing tax software because of file names such as TAX.FNT, and CUSTTAX.DBF. On the non-hidden directories, the investigators found other non-standard software, including the programs Prodigy, Quicken, and Lotus Suite (although one part of Lotus Suite was standard DOT software at the time). Over the next two months, the investigators reviewed the computers of other management personnel of the Accounting Bureau, including the Accounting Bureau's director, John Chevalier, and three Grade 23 employees, Glenn Walker, John DeFrancesco, and Herbert Whitmarsh. 15 In February 1997, DOT management and investigators met to examine the results from these searches. Assistant DOT Commissioner Knapek attended the meeting and, aware of Leventhal's private tax practice, was particularly interested in confirming the investigators' suspicion that Leventhal had loaded tax software on his DOT office computer. They decided to conduct a further search of Leventhal's computer to determine with greater certainty whether the PPU directory they had discovered during the first search was part of a tax preparation program. Investigators reexamined the computer in Leventhal's office once in February 1997 and twice in April 1997. During these subsequent searches, they copied the Morph and PPU directories onto a laptop computer, obtained additional printouts of the file directories, and opened a few files to examine their contents. In the first April search, an investigator noticed that some items had been added to the PPU directory since the previous search, indicating recent activity. The PPU directory was later identified as belonging to Pencil Pushers, a tax preparation program. 16 On May 2, 1997, shortly after informing Leventhal that he was under investigation and that the computer in his office would be confiscated, the Director of the DOT Employee Relations Bureau observed Leventhal appearing to delete items from his computer directories. Leventhal was then interrogated. He admitted to belonging to a group that had jointly purchased a single copy of the Pencil Pushers software that was then copied onto his computer and the computers of other members of the group. Leventhal also admitted that he had printed out up to five personal income tax returns from the computer in his DOT office. 17