Amid fallout from a scandal where politically connected and inexperienced workers were given high-paying positions, the Schools Development Authority was creating job descriptions for more than a dozen employees it had already hired — reverse-engineering what should have been a routine process at a time when it faced increasing scrutiny and calls for it to be abolished, new documents show.

And it appears the authority is still formulating the job descriptions, nine months after former Chief Executive Officer Lizette Delgado-Polanco began an organizational restructuring that included laying off roughly two dozen longtime workers and hiring people with personal and political connections to her.

The authority had argued that the job descriptions for about three dozen new employees hired by Delgado-Polanco were exempt from disclosure under the state’s Open Public Records Act. But new data obtained by NorthJersey.com and the USA TODAY NETWORK New Jersey show the authority did not even have job descriptions written to release at the time.

The Attorney General’s Office stepped in and released in April what it described as “generic” job descriptions after the Network filed a complaint with the state. Earlier this month, after another records request, the Network obtained metadata for those descriptions — details about a document’s data, such as the author and when the file was created, modified and saved.

The metadata shows that a little more than half the people hired by Delgado-Polanco did not have job descriptions for their titles at the time they were hired. And of those 20 job descriptions, all but four of them were written after the Network requested them in February. Most of the descriptions were created in March and April, according to the metadata.

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Delgado-Polanco, who resigned under pressure last month, had hired the employees as part of an authority-wide restructuring in which she created new positions or re-titled jobs in an effort to streamline operations. The Network found that many of the people Delgado-Polanco hired were connected to her personally or through the unions she once led. At least 10 of them did not meet basic qualifications for their positions, and the authority under her leadership did not follow its normal protocol for hiring.

Senate President Stephen Sweeney, who has pushed for the authority to be abolished, said he still has concerns about the authority even though it is under new leadership.

“We’ve given a lot of thought to the SDA and the fact that all of the hires that were made — and there was a lot of questionable hires — are still there,” Sweeney, D-Gloucester, said in an interview. He said he is eager to learn the results of an internal audit by the authority's board, “because it didn’t end with Lizette leaving.”

The audit is one of several inquiries into Delgado-Polanco’s eight-month tenure leading the authority, which has run out of money for new projects after exhausting $11 billion in bonding power to build new schools in poor areas. The authority's debt costs taxpayers $1 billion a year.

The Attorney General’s Office and State Commission of Investigation are also investigating the authority and its operations. Gov. Phil Murphy’s office has been reviewing the hiring and firing practices at the authority since at least February, though Murphy has said his staff was looking into it “long before” details were reported.

Citing the multiple reviews into personnel matters, a spokesman declined to say why the authority created job descriptions after employees were hired and whether doing so showed that those workers were favored for the positions. But the authority said the metadata provided to the Network was unreliable because it is not in its “natural, native state.”

In its response to the request for the metadata, the authority’s acting records custodian, Kristen MacLean, said the job descriptions that were provided in April had been scanned on March 21, but she had “not been able to identify the documents in their native format.”

The Network requested the job descriptions in February and the authority denied the request two weeks later, arguing that the documents, which are used in public job postings, were not subject to disclosure. On March 22 — the day after the descriptions were scanned — the Network filed a complaint with the state, arguing that the records were not exempt under the law.

Two weeks after that, on April 2, the Attorney General's Office said the schools authority "does maintain job descriptions on file, which are not specific to individual employees," and provided the "generic" descriptions.

MacLean said it appeared that some of those job descriptions were drafts, not final documents.

The authority was able to extract metadata from two computer drives for job descriptions, “which appear to be similar to those previously provided to you,” she said. Those documents are still in use by the authority, she said, and "as such, they are not static documents and the metadata being provided to you reflects various changes over time."

An authority spokesman said job descriptions were made using a template developed more than 10 years ago by the Economic Development Authority. Because of that, the metadata from previous drafts was attached to the file provided to the Network.

That would explain why the author for most of the job descriptions was listed as Bridget Hollister, who spent many years as a human resources officer at the Economic Development Authority but whose last payroll record is from 2016. For all but one of the documents, though, the owner was listed as Joel Guzman, who was hired in human resources by Delgado-Polanco with no experience in the field. The other owner is listed as Miguelina Diaz, another Delgado-Polanco hire, who is now the human resources director.

A representative where Delgado-Polanco now works did not respond to a message seeking comment from her.

No state or federal law requires job descriptions, according to the Society for Human Resource Management, but they are helpful — and common — tools for practical and legal reasons. And in New Jersey state government, job descriptions typically help establish salary ranges and maintain consistency across a department or agency.

The Municipal Research and Services Center, a nonprofit in Washington that provides legal and policy guidance to local governments there, said the first step of matching a candidate to a job is developing a “realistic” job description.

“Just as it wouldn't make sense to put two AAA batteries in a flashlight that requires two D batteries, it also would not make sense for an employer to hire someone into a position, if it didn't know what qualifications that position requires,” the organization said on its website.