Firings at L.A. building department are up sharply, G.M. says

The Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety has fired 10 employees for wrongdoing so far this year -- five times the number who lost their jobs for such reasons over the past decade, the agency’s top executive said.

Although the department is known as the subject of an FBI bribery sting, six of the 10 workers were terminated following an investigation into the falsification of time cards, said Robert “Bud” Ovrom, the department’s general manager.

Ovrom said five clerks and a supervisor were fired earlier this year after a bureau chief showed up at the department’s Van Nuys office shortly after 7 a.m. and found some of them missing. In one report on the case, investigators concluded that five workers had said they were at work "when in fact they were either out sick, taking time off ... or on vacation."

"In the kind of ethical crisis that we face, there has to be zero tolerance," Ovrom said.