For three months last year Joseph Lhota's daughter Kathryn Lhota worked on the political team of Gov. Andrew Cuomo while her dad ran the Cuomo-controlled transit system.

The campaign gig, which one watchdog group said should have been vetted to see whether it presented a potential conflict of interest for her father, came to light during a Crain's search deep into the crannies of the state Democratic Party's financial disclosures.

The state party last year paid the 27-year-old nearly $13,000 for a four-month stint, a bit less than she would have made had she not taken an unpaid leave from her nonpolitical, $65,000-a-year de Blasio administration job.

Her father resigned as Metropolitan Transportation Authority chairman in November. Cuomo, who had appointed him, also controls the state party apparatus.

Voting records show that Kathryn Lhota is a registered Republican, as her father was until dropping his party affiliation a year ago, and shares his Brooklyn Heights address. An only child, she resided there for the entirety of the period she received payments from the organization, beginning in August and ending in November, according to the state committee's disclosures.

Crain's search of campaign finance records found only one other political organization that has employed Lhota: her father's 2013 campaign for mayor, in which the elder Lhota was defeated by Bill de Blasio.

Good-government group Reinvent Albany questioned whether his daughter's hiring by the state party compromised Joseph Lhota's ability to put the MTA's interests ahead of the governor's.

"The issue, from our perspective as watchdogs, especially as a watchdog of authorities, is Lhota is supposed to be exercising independent fiduciary judgment as the chair and CEO [of the MTA] and is supposed to be exercising some independence from the governor," said John Kaehny, executive director of Reinvent Albany. "It's definitely a concern that he's getting paid, through an entity controlled by the governor, the state Democratic Party—or [rather] his adult daughter, who he clearly continues to have a close relationship with, since he continues to live with her or she with him."

However, because she would have earned more at her city job for the Office of Emergency Management, her stint with the state did not augment the Lhota household income. But the professional experience she gained was valuable, as she participated in campaign activities beyond what she had previously, potentially enhancing her future career prospects.

Joseph Lhota did not receive a salary from the MTA during his most recent year-and-a-half tenure but held high-ranking concurrent positions at NYU Langone and Madison Square Garden. Kaehny argued that his daughter's hiring should have required public clearance by the Joint Commission on Public Ethics, as her father's side jobs did.

"It comes across as the governor as rewarding one of his top appointees for doing what he wants. Even if that's not true, there's still that appearance. At a minimum, they should have sought an opinion on it from JCOPE," said Kaehny. "Being that she's a registered Republican, why would she want to work on Democratic campaigns? That's a fair and natural question for the public to ask."

The answer might be in an interview with The Wall Street Journal during her father's 2013 run for mayor, in which Lhota said she voted Republican but was "more socially liberal" than the national party.

"The Republican Party needs to fundamentally change if we're going to broaden our scope of supporters," she said in the piece. "The country is moving socially left. We're going to move left."

The state Democratic Party did not make her available for an interview with Crain's. Her father declined to comment.

State party leaders said her hiring this past summer was not the consequence of nepotism, but of a sterling professional recommendation they received on her behalf from a person whose name they could not recall. They said potential employees are not asked about their political affiliation during the interview process, only about their passion for electing Democrats.

The party said Lhota crafted press releases for its state and congressional candidates, compiled news clips and internally directed reporters' queries.

"Kathryn Lhota was valued member of the NY Dems team this election cycle," said Geoff Berman, who served as the party organization's executive director until mid-December. "She was hired for her combination of communications and government experience, and proved to be a very effective and reliable employee."

Her campaign stint last summer and job with the de Blasio administration have not been previously reported, as she has been working behind the scenes. Crain's found no record of her being listed as a press contact, and because the committee paid her most of her wages out of its state and national accounts simultaneously, the disbursements not appear among those accounts' publicly listed expenditures. Instead, they appear in a more obscure section of the committee's filings with the Federal Elections Commission, known as Schedule H4, which delineates "disbursement for allocated federal/nonfederal activity."

Public records compiled by SeeThroughNY.net show Lhota's government experience includes a few months as an administrative aide for the state Division of Military and Naval Affairs in 2016 and 2017 and as an emergency preparedness specialist for the city Office of Emergency Management from late 2017 until the present.

In a January 2017 writeup on the website of Poly Prep Country Day School, a private school in Brooklyn from which she earned a high school diploma in 2009, Lhota said her state job was as a planning analyst with the Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services.

The Poly Prep piece adds that Lhota was a press coordinator for the New Jersey governor (presumably Chris Christie) before moving on to the Cuomo administration, and worked on an unnamed 2008 presidential campaign as a high school sophomore. She earned a bachelor's degree in government from Georgetown University and in 2016 received an M.S. in healthcare emergency management from Boston University.