Denver court manager spent $25,000 hiring freelancers to do her job, left work for sexual encounters, investigation found

A Denver County Court manager resigned last year while facing an internal investigation over the misuse of court money, fraud and inappropriate workplace behavior in an incident that some employees now say undermined their confidence in the court’s human resources process.

Alice Ehr, a 14-year employee of Denver County Court, resigned from her position as court interpreter administrator after an internal disciplinary investigation found evidence that she spent at least $25,000 of the court’s money to hire contractors to do her job — sometimes on days she worked second jobs, conducted personal business or left work to have sexual encounters, according to a disciplinary letter obtained by The Denver Post.

The disciplinary investigation found evidence of “multiple examples of time and monetary fraud,” including that Ehr abused vacation time and remote work and allowed a subordinate to do the same; sent sexually explicit emails from her work account; and left the office during the workday on several occasions to meet the person she was emailing for sex, according to the letter.

Ehr on Monday said the allegations against her were false, that emails were taken out of context and that she had permission from her supervisor to hire the contractors. She left the job because the stress of the investigation was taking a toll on her health, she said.

“I was told, ‘OK, the investigation is over if you leave,’” she said. “I was like, ‘OK, perfect. Good.”

The court’s investigation into Ehr did end with her departure.

Denver County Court Executive Kristin Wood accepted Ehr’s resignation in April as officials were preparing to fire Ehr, county court spokeswoman Carolyn Tyler said in a statement Monday. County court officials did not refer the case to Denver police for a criminal investigation, and Ehr’s alleged misconduct was not publicly addressed with county court employees after she left.

Ehr sought to change her resignation to a retirement five days later, a move that could make her eligible to receive retirement benefits. Julie Vlier, spokeswoman for Denver Employees Retirement Plan, would not confirm whether Ehr is receiving those benefits, citing city privacy rules.

Denver County Court is run by the City and County of Denver and is separate from the Colorado Judicial Department, which operates the state’s district courts.

The supervisor’s quiet departure served as confirmation for some of her employees that the court’s human resources process couldn’t be trusted, said four court interpreters who spoke with The Post on the condition of anonymity to avoid professional retaliation.

Each said Ehr’s misconduct went beyond what was detailed in the disciplinary letter, and said she discussed her sex life with them — her subordinates — in graphic detail on a near-daily basis at work, sometimes showing them pornographic images during the conversations. The Post reviewed several text exchanges in which Ehr discussed sex during the workday, including one exchange in which Ehr shared a pornographic image with a subordinate.

“If you didn’t play along, her mood would change drastically,” one interpreter said. “Her voice would change, her face, her eyebrows would raise. The abuse of power was incredible.”

The interpreters did not previously speak up about the conversations because they did not believe court leaders would take appropriate action and worried they would face retaliation, they said. Many interpreters work on a freelance basis and felt Ehr, who was well-liked and influential in the interpreting community, could use her professional influence to block them from interpreting jobs statewide. Ehr’s resignation cemented those concerns, they said. She now works as a freelance interpreter herself.

“What happened in Denver County Court — it makes me lose trust in the system,” one interpreter said.

“I blame her supervisors,” said another. “I blame the administration. Like, where were they when all of this was happening?”

Allegations of misconduct

The internal investigation into Ehr started in early 2023 when someone submitted an anonymous complaint to the Denver Board of Ethics alleging Ehr was working second jobs while on the clock, among other misconduct.

A subsequent investigation by Denver County Court’s human resources department found evidence for eight separate misconduct issues, according to the disciplinary letter. Denver County Court denied The Post’s open records request for the letter, but the newspaper obtained it through other means.

The most serious of the eight allegations was the accusation that Ehr hired contract interpreters to “dispatch” interpreters in Denver County Court. The person dispatching sends interpreters to various courtrooms as needed throughout the day.

Dispatching is a “primary function” of Ehr’s job, according to the disciplinary letter. Yet Denver County Court spent more than $25,000 in 2022 alone to pay contract interpreters to do dispatching, the letter says, noting that Denver County Court “may have paid significantly more than $25,000” for such work.

The internal investigation found Ehr hired contractors at the same dates and times she left work to engage in a sexual affair with “an individual outside of (Denver County Court),” the letter says.

Ehr on Monday said she hired the contractors during the COVID-19 pandemic so that she could go and personally interpret in courtrooms.

“The judges really wanted in-person interpreters and no one was willing to come in person,” she said. “…So I hired someone to work for me to dispatch me into the courtrooms because I was the only one willing to go in person. So that was a creative solution, until they decided to tell me it wasn’t a good idea.”

Ehr also said she had permission to hire the contractors from her direct supervisor, Deputy Court Administrator Bill Heaney, but that he “conveniently didn’t remember” approving the spending when questioned about it in the investigation. The disciplinary letter notes Heaney “adamantly denies” knowing about the arrangement.

Ehr on Monday admitted to discussing her sex life at work with one colleague who she said was also a close friend, but said she never had any inkling that the conversations were making anyone uncomfortable.

“That is news to me,” she said.

Ehr has a gregarious and magnetic personality, the four interpreters said, and blurred the lines between professional relationships and personal friendships, particularly when discussing her sex life.

“I can just tell you it was super uncomfortable,” one interpreter said. “It was unsolicited and I didn’t say anything because I needed the work. She wasn’t putting a gun to my head to listen to her, but you know what I mean. I would sometimes play dumb or go out for a drink of water.”

“I honestly considered it part of my job to listen to all this stuff,” another said. “I don’t want to piss her off.”

The investigation also found evidence that Ehr worked secondary interpreting jobs while on the clock, including conducting language proficiency interviews for the city’s Civil Service Commission and translating parent-teacher conferences. City financial records show the Civil Service Commission paid Ehr $7,025 between 2021 and April 2023.

She also worked on authoring a book and attended book-related workshops during work hours, according to the letter. Investigators found she took week-long trips to Hawaii in 2021 and to Breckenridge in 2022 in which she claimed to be working remotely but “there is little-to-no indication (she) produced any work on behalf of DCC” during the trips, according to the letter.

Ehr said she had more than 1,000 documents showing that she did nothing wrong during her tenure at Denver County Court, but declined to provide any of those documents to The Post, saying she’d burned them in a bonfire. She provided a copy of the closing statement she made during a disciplinary hearing last year.

“I take responsibility for the things I made mistakes on,” the statement reads. “I apologize for those, and ask that you also believe that I have never acted with malice or intentionality to harm the reputation or dignity of the city, nor to steal from it.”

“Theft of time”

Denver County Court leaders did not refer Ehr’s alleged misconduct to Denver police for a criminal investigation because they did not feel the conduct rose to the level of a crime, Tyler said.

“These are Career Service Rule violations of dishonesty amounting to ‘theft of time,’ which is distinct from criminal theft of property or funds covered by the state and local criminal statutes,” she said in a statement. “…While Ms. Ehr’s actions were clearly an abuse of trust and created unnecessary expense to the city as a result of her scheduling abuses, her actions were not a clear violation of Colorado’s criminal theft statutes.”

Recently, three Denver police officers have faced criminal charges over secondary employment fraud. Officer Ryan Roybal pleaded guilty to a felony theft charge in November for billing a private employer for just over $8,000 for work that he did not do. In 2022, two other police officers faced theft charges for receiving $5,000 and $3,700 under similar circumstances.

Colorado’s theft laws are set up to deal with the theft of items or of money, while fraud statutes cover theft through deception, said former Boulder County District Attorney Stan Garnett. State laws are less suited to address “general dishonesty at work,” he said.

“What they’re describing, I think a lot of people would refer that for a criminal review and let the authorities decide whether it should be prosecuted, but it’s not unreasonable to chose not to do that,” he said of Ehr’s case. He noted the city could pursue a civil lawsuit to try to recoup misused funds.

Generally, organizations are often hesitant to report employees to police and instead allow employees to resign because it is “safe,” said Russell Cropanzano, professor of organizational behavior at the University of Colorado Boulder.

But he said allowing a resignation in lieu of discipline has a wider impact on the organization’s workforce, especially over time.

“If the offense is very egregious and the person resigns and there are no other sanctions, then the other employees just feel bad,” he said. “They feel like that person got away with it.”

Such a resignation can undermine employees’ perceptions of the organization’s “procedural and distributive justice,” he said, that is, employees’ confidence that the human resources process is fair and reliable, and that the severity of discipline matches the severity of the offense.

“If this woman cheated and got away with it, and her status in the industry is not harmed, she’ll just go get another job,” he said “…So these people just keep doing it over and over again. It has these long-term effects are kind of pernicious.”

Denver County Court’s human resources department thoroughly investigates allegations of misconduct and does not tolerate retaliation for reporting such misconduct, Tyler said in the statement.

“Moreover, if an employee is uncomfortable for any reason raising concerns to our own HR Department, they have an open door to the City and County of Denver’s main HR Department as a separate confidential resource,” the statement said.

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