Man Sentenced For Using WDFW Gas Cards To Buy Fuel

A former WDFW Region 5 information technology staffer who used state gas cards for personal use will do three months in prison and has been ordered to pay nearly $57,000 back to the agency.

Robert “Bob” D. Woodard, 50, was sentenced early last week for the crimes, according to The Daily News of Longview.

In 2018 we reported how Woodard had been investigated and fired after allegedly stealing nearly $80,000 worth of fuel during the 2010s using his and other WDFW staffers’ gas cards and pin numbers.

According to fish and wildlife officers’ reports, Woodard used them to fill up his diesel pickup, his wife’s Honda, his old fishing boat, as well as his gas cans over a period of eight years.

Woodard had worked for WDFW for two and a half decades when in late October 2017 a fellow staffer at the agency’s Southwest Washington regional office told fish and wildlife officers he couldn’t find the gas card for a “seldom used research vessel.”

That led to an investigation that turned up gas-station footage of a man resembling Woodard fueling up a green pickup truck registered to him on 11 separate occasions in August, September and October of that year.

Woodard was confronted in mid-November and fired the next month. The case became public in February 2018, including with a report on KING 5.

The case led WDFW to change “the fuel payment system, reducing the amount of credit cards, developing a system that analyzes purchases and requiring supervisors to approve gas purchases,” The Daily News reported.