A former electronic-library project administrator with Arizona’s largest community-college district has accused the boss who fired her last fall of misusing hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal grant money that was designated for the library project, according to the East Valley Tribune, a Phoenix-area newspaper.

The Tribune reported, citing e-mail records, that the National Science Foundation was investigating the former employee’s complaint. A spokeswoman for the federal science agency, however, would neither confirm nor deny that it had undertaken such an inquiry.

The complaint relates to a $1.7-million grant the Maricopa County Community College District received from the NSF in 2005 for its Advanced Technology Education Center. A visiting review committee found the center’s progress “insufficient” on key projects in 2006, the newspaper said. The center’s director, Michael Lesiecki, fired the employee, Kim Grady, in September 2007.

Ms. Grady complained to the NSF that Mr. Lesiecki was using the library grant to pay for other activities of the center, the newspaper reported, and complained separately to the district that the money she had expected to receive from the grant was short by as much as $200,000 every month.

Mr. Lesiecki and other college officials did not respond to the newspaper’s requests for comment. If the NSF money was misused, the college could be at risk of losing millions of federal grant dollars. The district has hired an outside firm to conduct an investigation of its own, the newspaper said. —Charles Huckabee