The inspector general of the U-S Energy Department says the former Republican congresswoman who is the incoming president of South Dakota School of Mines and Technology collected $450,000 in questionable payments from the nation’s federally funded nuclear labs after she left office.

The inspector general says Heather Wilson of New Mexico failed to document what she did to earn $20,000 a month from the Los Alamos and Sandia national labs in New Mexico from 2009 to 2011 or nearly $30,000 from the Nevada Test Site and the Oak Ridge lab in Tennessee.

The inspector general says the private contractors who run the labs have reimbursed the government for the payments…which apparently included money from the Sandia lab to pay her to lobby for more defense dollars, an apparent violation of her contract.

The South Dakota Board of Regents picked Wilson as the next School of Mines president in late April, and the board’s executive director says the inspector general’s report has not changed the board’s support of her hiring.

Jack Warner says he has spoken with Wilson and is confident she performed what was expected of her under her contracts with the labs. Wilson is scheduled to begin work Monday as the school’s 19th president, the first female chief executive in its 128-year history.