HAMILTON — When they see something strange — or someone up to no good — Hamilton school district employees might soon have someone to call in a third party fraud hotline.

At Wednesday night’s board meeting, the body unanimously passed a measure to get bids on such a hotline after hearing a presentation from Keith Ingling, from the district’s new auditing firm, Hoffman Freina Allison, P.C. He said establishing such a hotline would give his firm the opportunity to assess risk in the district above and beyond the staff interviews his firm would conduct.

“Some people already have spoken to us, but we believe there are a lot of other people out there who we believe are afraid to speak to us,” he said.

The proposed hotline would go through a third party vendor and he said any complaints made would be evaluated by an attorney, ideally one with prosecutorial experience. Then, the district would hire a licensed investigator to root out any complaints that the attorney had merit. He said the board and taxpayers would likely be most satisfied by a process that involved the district administration as little as possible.

“Given the circumstances surrounding the current situation here, a lot of people might believe that sort of defeats the purpose,” if the district received such complaints, he said.

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