RALEIGH, N.C. -- A former maintenance manager at North Carolina State University used his position to benefit personally from campus projects in part through subcontracts with his family-operated firm, a state auditor's report said Monday.

As a facility mechanical engineer, the N.C. State employee wrote purchase specifications and participated in the bid review for two large air conditioning unit projects for university buildings that separate companies won, according to the auditor's special review.

The worker, whom N.C. State fired in May, also sold products to the companies that likely totaled more than $140,000, Auditor Les Merritt's office said. Another person who worked for the winning companies at the time of each bid appears to have been involved in some of the transactions, the report said.

State law prevents public employees who make or administer contracts from directly benefiting from them. The auditor sent the case to the Wake County District Attorney's Office for possible prosecution.

"By submitting a bid on behalf of his own business, interacting with another company's representative that also submitted bids to NCSU, and selling equipment to that company for a profit, we believe the project manager violated (state law) and his fiduciary obligations to NCSU," the review said.

In one contract for a 400-ton chiller at a campus research building, the employee acknowledged he had sold a chiller to INCO Inc., the company that won the bid to equip a campus research building, with a $10,000 markup. The cost of the chiller had been quoted at $132,703, according to the review.

The mechanical engineer, which wasn't named in the report, and his wife owned a company called Temperature Control Technology that had a mailing address in Kansas.

In the second air conditioning job in September 2005, N.C. State awarded a $257,025 contract to Industrial Turnaround Corp. for work on the Engineering Graduate Research Center.

Industrial Turnaround agreed to purchase a chiller from Temperature Control Technology, but canceled the order when representatives questioned the transaction procedure and whether the engineer had connections to Temperature Control.

The review also found that Temperature Control had sold $14,108.25 in equipment to Industrial Turnaround for five other projects at N.C. State, Peace College and a state building. A check dated Feb. 13 for nearly $12,000 had been sent directly to the manager's home and endorsed by him.

The manager, who started work at N.C. State in August 2002, also failed to disclose his outside work with Temperate Control Technology to the university, the review said.

The university, in a response to a draft of the audit, said it will require a higher level of review than before for projects valued above $20,000 starting Sept. 1. Databases also will be examined to determine any other potential conflicts between workers and vendors, the school said.

N.C. State's public relations office didn't return a phone message Monday.

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