The former deputy director of DC’s Department of Buildings is the poster girl for why employers don’t like their employees to work remotely and it caught up with her big time.

Carolina Lian was pulling down $175,000 a year in that position but evidently, it wasn’t enough. She was working two other jobs as well… not one after another, but all at the same time.

She was also earning six figures from Freddie Mac and was serving on the Falls Church City Council from 2022 through 2025.

DC’s Board of Ethics and Accountability investigated Lian’s employment according to the Daily Mail. The probe found that she had violated the code of conduct in four ways, as reported by WUSA. Lian was fined $25,000 and is no longer working at any of the jobs she held.

(Video Credit: WUSA9)

Lian asserted that she made a “clerical error” over the jobs and called the investigation “very petty” according to the Falls Church News-Press.

The timeline of her employment with the DC government at the Department of Buildings began in October 2022 when she was hired as the chief operations officer starting at $149,750 a year. She was promoted a year later to deputy director, becoming the second-highest-ranking official at the Buildings Department. That brought her salary to $175,000 a year.

Lian’s evident downfall was getting greedy and sloppy.

“In her position, she would work in the office Mondays and Fridays, and from home Tuesdays through Thursdays. But unbeknownst to the government, she had already been working at Freddie Mac – also known as the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp. – since 2015. Lian was a third-party risk management director in the private sector business, working from home Monday and Friday and in the office Tuesdays through Thursdays,” the Daily Mail wrote.

Sadly she probably wasn’t doing anything at either. Just cruising through the day.

— Ruby (@thisorthat17) August 8, 2024

“In a third position that the government was aware of, she was elected to serve a four-year term on the Falls Church City Council from 2022 through 2025 – a position that paid $9,200 a year,” the outlet added.

“But in her required public financial disclosure statements from 2022 and 2023 – on which city employees are required to disclose any outside activity or employment where they make more than $200 – Lian did not report her earnings from Freddie Mac, investigators found,” the Daily Mail continued.

She did disclose her position on the city council. That is a public position and would be noticed. However, she reportedly recorded her time incorrectly on at least 10 different occasions. Specifically claiming she was on the job for her DC position while attending city council meetings.

NBC Washington reported that those incidents included in-person budget meetings on Friday mornings when she was supposed to be working at the Department of Buildings. There’s allegedly video proving that occurred. She also underreported her income in 2022 as less than $1,000 instead of $9,200 a year. Lian would go on to submit an amendment claiming she chose the wrong category of income in her paperwork.

“I’ve corrected the form, paid the fine and now I am moving on,” Lian tersely told the News-Press in an interview.

That wasn’t the end of her problems – not by a long shot.

“But in the aftermath, Falls Church city officials said they conducted their own investigation and found that Lian only listed Freddie Mac as her employer and ‘did not disclose her employment relationship with the District of Columbia,’ a spokeswoman for the city said,” the Daily Mail noted. “City officials then referred the matter to the commonwealth’s attorney for investigation, and Lian resigned from her position there as well.”

The Arlington County Commonwealth’s Attorney commented to NBC Washington that they are working with local law enforcement to conduct yet another investigation into whether Lian committed fraud on her paperwork for the city. So her problems are ongoing while her employment isn’t.

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