Tarrant DA's Office Investigating Former IT Manager's Receipts

FORT WORTH (CBSDFW.COM) - A former Tarrant County IT manager in charge of millions of taxpayer dollars is accused of staying in a place he owned and charging taxpayers for it.

The Tarrant County District Attorney's office says Mark O'Neal often stayed at the Silverleaf Resort nestled on the shores of Canyon Lake, near San Antonio.  It was where O'Neal would go on county related business trips.

A county auditor's report says he owned a timeshare at the resort, but was charging taxpayers up to $270 a night to stay there.

"Anytime we find it's taxpayer money, we jump on it," says Marvin Collins, the First Assistant with Tarrant County District Attorney's Office.

O'Neal charged the county  a little more than $2,800 for hotel expenses, never revealing he was staying in his own place.  Collins says O'Neal's wife Margaret helped him to cover it up.

"They manufactured these receipts, quite good ones I might add," explains O'Neal. "This is not a big amount of money as money goes, but it's something we don't tolerate."

O'Neal was fired last December for allegedly having pornographic images on his county-owned laptop.  At the time, he was in charge of a court records project that had cost the county millions of dollars and has taken several years to develop.  To this day, the software is only partially online.

Tarrant County auditors filed a report last year questioning technology contracts awarded to a Southlake company that has failed to upload the software it was paid to create online.

The county has paid XPedient Technologies about $4 million to create a system so that the courthouse, jail and other parts of the justice system can share records and communicate better with each other.

CBS 11 tried to reach O'Neal for comment, but no one was home.  Calls to his attorney were not returned either.

O'Neal and his wife are charged with tampering with governmental records.  Margaret O'Neal is also accused of lying to prosecutors.

If found guilty they could face a maximum of 2 years in jail.