In a March deposition, Corbett answered "I don't know" to numerous questions about how his office was run. He said he could not remember whether any claim of mismanagement had crossed his desk.
Nils Frederiksen, spokesman for the Attorney General's Office, described the allegations in the two lawsuits as "baseless" and "without merit."
The cases, which are being handled as one, are moving toward the trial stage only now. They have the potential to become an issue as Corbett heads toward his fall campaign for governor against Democrat Dan Onorato.
The first suit arose while Corbett sought reelection as attorney general in 2008; the other was filed in 2009. Pretrial motions by lawyers are due July 16.
In his suit, Thomas D. Kimmett, a former senior deputy attorney general, contends that he tried in vain to get higher-ups to pay attention to what he saw as the waste of hundreds of thousands of dollars in the attorney general's Financial Enforcement Section.
He says private collection agencies were improperly paid large commissions for work that the attorney general's in-house staff had done to recover taxes and other money owed to the state.
Also, he says, some cases were settled for a small fraction of the money that the state could, and should, have been able to collect.
His suit says those actions amounted to gross mismanagement, perhaps even fraud.
Kimmett, who is a certified public accountant and lawyer, says the agency ignored his findings to avoid drawing negative attention during the 2008 fall election. Soon after the election, he was fired.
Kimmett's contentions, contained in a legal complaint he filed in U.S. District Court in Harrisburg, are echoed in the second lawsuit, filed by Sherry E. Bellaman, a collections analyst in the Attorney General's Office who worked a subordinate to Kimmett.
