Medical company CEO’s resume and application list degrees he didn’t earn
This is the second of two articles about Mako Medical CEO and campaign donor Chad Price. The first article explores his campaign contributions and those of people tied to him.
The Wake County Board of Commissioners had more than 20 applicants interested in being appointed to the Wake Tech Board of Trustees when a slot opened up in 2014. Their names, addresses and qualifications were made public a month ahead of the commissioners’ decision.
When it came time to vote, a new candidate emerged: Chad Price, an Apex businessman who was on the verge of launching Mako Medical, a lab testing company, and was active in Republican politics. Paul Coble, a commissioner and former Raleigh mayor, nominated Price, telling his colleagues Price’s resume had been placed on their desks.
The GOP-controlled board appointed Price in a partisan 4-3 vote with little discussion. The resume the county has on file for Price shows two academic degrees he didn’t earn and a vice president position with Ford Motor Company he didn’t attain.
It’s not the only time Price has submitted inflated qualifications to a government agency. The following year, Price applied for a contract with the state transportation department to run a license plate agency. That application lists an advanced degree he didn’t earn.
Price, in an email to The News & Observer, blamed an intern for the misinformation on his resume. He did not provide the intern’s name. He also did not explain the misinformation on his contract application.
The N&O discovered the inflated qualifications while looking into Price’s involvement with government agencies. In both cases, Price was dealing with agencies led by Wake County Republicans.
State and county officials now say they don’t know if those qualifications were checked.
Resume claims
The resume on file with Wake County lists Price’s work experience up to 2014. “Wake Tech” is handwritten in the upper corner.
It shows he claimed a bachelor’s degree in business from the University of Maryland at College Park and an associate’s degree in aerospace design from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, which the resume misidentified as “Emery Riddle.”
The registrar’s office at the University of Maryland’s flagship campus could find no record of Price’s attendance. The N&O confirmed Price has a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Maryland University College, which is an online higher learning institution based in Adelphi, Maryland.
A records specialist for the registrar’s office at Embry-Riddle in Daytona Beach, Fla., said officials could find no evidence he had taken classes at the university. Price said in an email to The N&O that he took online courses, but did not confirm he had a degree.
His resume also said he had been a vice president for “brand management” at the Ford Motor Company from June 2001 to December 2004. A Ford spokeswoman said she couldn’t find evidence he worked in that position. Price later said in the email to The N&O that he worked for Lincoln/Mercury dealerships.
Wake County’s board clerk, Denise Hogan, was a deputy clerk at the time of the appointment, and became the board clerk the following year. She said it’s up to the commissioners to check applicants’ qualifications.
“There’s no third party, there’s no staff person that actually goes through every application because we’ve got 70 plus boards and some of the boards have 30 members on them or more,” she said. “We might get 500 applications a year.”
Coble is now the legislative services director at the Republican-led state legislature. He did not return The N&O’s phone and email messages.
Price was reappointed to the Wake Tech board in June 2018. By then Democrats had taken control of the county board of commissioners. The Wake Tech board chairman, Thomas Looney, had given the commissioners a letter in support of a second term, calling Price an “extremely valuable” member who serves as its liaison to the state legislature.
Commissioner Sig Hutchinson, a Democrat, wasn’t on the board when Price was first appointed, but he put forward Price for reappointment. Two months earlier, state election records show Price, close business associate Jerry Bynum, and Bynum’s wife Stephanie each donated $5,200 to Hutchinson’s campaign. Price contributed another $5,000 to Hutchinson’s campaign in October of that year.
Hutchinson said the campaign money had nothing to do with his support of Price’s reappointment. He said he sees no reason now to remove Price from the board over the misinformation in his resume and contract application.
“To me he’s the type of person we need on the board of Wake Tech in terms of his business experience and his connections and his ability to raise money,” Hutchinson said.
DMV license plate agency
Inflated academic qualifications also show up in Price’s application in 2015 for a state transportation contract to run a license plate agency in Holly Springs. At that time Republicans controlled the executive branch. The NC Division of Motor Vehicles, which is under the NC Department of Transportation, decides who wins those contracts.
Price’s application for the contract listed a bachelor’s degree in finance and a graduate degree in business from the University of Maryland. He has neither. Under work experience, “N/A” was written, which usually means “not applicable.”
Two others who bid for the contract listed their educational and work experience. NCDOT officials said they could not find a resume or similar document showing Price’s work experience, and they could not explain why he didn’t fill out that section of the application.
Price listed former state Supreme Court Chief Justice Mark Martin, Associate Supreme Court Justice Robert Edmunds and Lt. Gov. Dan Forest as references on his application. All are Republicans.
Price has identified himself as Martin’s former election campaign chief of staff, and campaign finance reports from 2014 show Price provided Martin with roughly $14,000 in services such as purchasing signs for which he was reimbursed. Martin, who is now dean of Regent University’s law school, did not return phone or email messages from The N&O.
Edmunds said he could not recall whether Price asked him for a reference, but he wouldn’t be surprised if he gave one. Edmunds said he met Price in 2014, while Price was working on another candidate’s election campaign. Price later helped Edmunds with his 2016 election campaign and suggested potential help in the business community.
“He appeared genuine in everything he did,” Edmunds said.
Tata and Mako
At the time the contract was awarded, Tony Tata ran NCDOT as Republican Gov. Pat McCrory’s transportation secretary. Tata is a retired U.S. Army brigadier general, novelist and Fox News commentator. He had been Wake County schools superintendent before McCrory named him NCDOT secretary.
Price contacted Tata in an email on June 6, 2013, and congratulated him on winning the NCDOT appointment. Price also asked if Tata could help with a USO event. Price dropped the names of several prominent Republicans — including Forest, House Speaker Pro Tem Paul “Skip” Stam and Newby — whose election campaigns received his help.
State records show Price won the contract to run Holly Springs’ license plate agency on May 7, 2015. Two months later, on July 28, Tata resigned from the NCDOT. At the time, he cited the stress of his day job, the success of his novel-writing and family demands.
Within weeks, Tata filed documents with the N.C. Secretary of State’s Office to create a Mako spinoff company – Mako Government Services.
In a phone interview, Tata said he wasn’t involved in approving the license plate agency contract, and the Mako spinoff never got off the ground.
“The short story is (Price) reached out to me after I left the secretary position, inquired if I would be interested in working with Mako Medical,” Tata said. “The only fit that I saw was leveraging my government experience, so I established Mako Government Services, and then I moved to Wilmington and followed a different line of business and let that expire with no activity.”
An NCDOT spokeswoman said department officials did not know what vetting was done of Price’s application. The application includes a release signed by Price giving the DMV authority to access records to investigate his “employment record, medical history, credit records, criminal record and educational background.”
“The program supervisor over the license plate agencies at the time this contract was awarded is no longer with the division and the folks that were here don’t have any insight into why the other applicants were not selected,” said Binta Cisse, an NCDOT spokeswoman.
The contract was signed by the DMV’s commissioner at the time, Kelly Thomas. Neither he nor the former program supervisor, Donna Boone, could be reached by The N&O.
The license plate agency drew national attention for its bright decor, customer service, and a cafe that sold cupcakes. The cafe was no longer operating when an N&O reporter visited the office recently.
BEHIND THE STORY
MOREHow we did this story
Eight months ago we received a tip about potentially illegal campaign contributions across several states — contributions coming from a woman with a severe mental disability who could not have made them.
The tip came from her father, Larry Price, who lives in Clayton. He and his wife had lost custody of their daughter to Chad Price, their son and the co-founder of Mako Medical, a fast-rising lab testing company in North Raleigh that has drawn positive media coverage in its short history. The parents suspected their son made the contributions, and told us of many other contributions made by their son and others connected with Mako.
We confirmed the contributions in Jessica Price’s name through election records, and then did a wider search for contributions connected to Chad Price and Mako. This involved weeks of searching databases and campaign reports at the Federal Election Commission, seven states, and the campaign reporting nonprofit followthemoney.org. We also searched the N.C. Secretary of State’s database of corporation filings to find out the ownership behind several businesses that made contributions to South Carolina candidates, or held commercial properties being used by Mako.
The amount of money given in the past five years — roughly $560,000 — showed Chad Price to be a big player in campaign circles. We then filed public information requests into his connections with state and local government, and found a resume and an application for an NC DMV contract that inflated his qualifications.
Price talked with us on the phone initially and consented to give us a tour of Mako’s lab-testing facility in Henderson, which received state and local incentives, but then declined further interviews. He answered some follow-up questions via email, but hasn’t responded to more recent email and phone requests.
We also interviewed, or sought to interview, several others involved in the contributions, regulators for state and federal election agencies, and campaign finance experts.
The campaign activity and the exaggerated qualifications are important for the public to know. Campaign contributions are closely tracked to make sure contributors don’t have a secret, outsized influence on the public’s business. Those seeking state or local board positions or government contracts are also expected to provide accurate information about their education and experience to show they are worthy of doing the public’s business.
This story was originally published February 6, 2020 at 10:00 AM with the headline "Medical company CEO’s resume and application list degrees he didn’t earn."