A former Iowa Lakes Community College administrator is suing the northwest Iowa institution, alleging she was wrongly fired after reporting financial irregularities to federal law enforcement.
Erin Latona, according to her lawsuit, worked from 2022 until February 2025 as a dean and then chief academic officer for Iowa Lakes, which has campuses in Algona, Emmetsburg, Spencer, Spirit Lake and Estherville.
She was fired, she says, because her superiors suspected, correctly, that she was responsible for a special investigation by the state Auditor Rob Sand's office that remains ongoing. (A spokesperson for Sand confirmed his office is "performing procedures" related to Iowa Lakes.)
According to her complaint, filed July 11 in Emmet County, soon after taking the job, Latona began noticing financial irregularities at the college, including improperly granting federal aid to students who were not attending classes, inflating enrollment figures reported to state and federal authorities, and seeking and obtaining public grant money, in some cases worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, while failing to provide the academic offerings those grants required.
In one case, she alleges, Iowa Lakes President Scott Stokes responded to concerns she'd raised by saying the college had done the "bare minimum" to comply with a grant. He went on to say that "we just go after the money without really having anyone to make sure that things happen” and shrugged, she alleged.
In June 2023, Latona...
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