One heavy user of Salt Lake County's tuition assistance program — a program now under fire for sloppiness and possible abuses — accepted county money six different times and yet never completed a class.

That person was tuition coordinator Lisa Funderburk, the employee who administered the program.

Funderburk paid the amount back in fits and starts. But over the course of a seven-year period from August 1996 to October 2003, she continually owed the county money — as much as $1,357 at one point, according to payroll records obtained by the Deseret Morning News — while still applying for and receiving additional tuition assistance.

"I totally have to take responsibility," she said in an interview Monday. "There's no excuse."

As to why she was so slow in paying back the tuition assistance, "The main reason was because I thought I had" repaid it, she said.

Two county employees, who declined to be identified, were not so charitable. They accused Funderburk of telling them and others that she was using the program basically as an interest-free line of credit.

"This is a great personal loan program," one employee said Funderburk told her.

Funderburk disputes ever saying that.

"Certainly there was never any intent to play the system," she said. "I cannot believe the lies that are coming out of this. I'm totally disgusted that people would make up these things."

County personnel director Felix McGowan, Funderburk's boss, calls her situation "abnormal" but says he believes her.

"My personal belief is that that is not true (that she made the statement), but there's no way that I can disprove it," he said. "I don't believe Lisa ever looked at the program that way."

McGowan has given Funderburk a written reprimand, but she remains at her post.

According to the Salt Lake Community College registrar, Funderburk registered for classes there in fall 1996, summer 1998, fall 1998, summer 1999, fall 1999, fall 2000, spring 2001, summer 2001 and fall 2001 for a total of $2,832 in county tuition assistance. She sought and received county tuition assistance for six of those registrations, paying the three remaining ones herself.

The county has no record of grades received for the courses during that period, and Funderburk herself conceded that she dropped every one, even the ones she herself paid for. She said she was going through an intense period of personal and family problems at the time and bounced back and forth between trying to further her education and meeting a reality in which finishing the courses was impossible.

"I can see now that it was a mistake," she said. "I'm actually glad the (audit) happened because I think it will weed out people like me who weren't really serious about going" to college.