PORTLAND, Ore. - Your gas tax money is supposed to buy new, safe and long-lasting highways but an Oregon Department of Transportation whistleblower says your tax dollars are being misspent and your safety is at risk.

Ray Perry spent 25 years working on our state's roads with ODOT.  As a former ODOT Quality Assurance Monitor, he spent more than a decade testing highways across Oregon to make sure they were built correctly.

"About 10 years ago, there was a change in programs," he told us.

That change allowed contractors to monitor the work themselves. Perry's job was to make sure those tests were valid and the roads were safe and sturdy. 

"They're shortcutting every time you turn around," he said, referring not to the contractors, but to ODOT.

Perry said his bosses in Bend and in Salem ignored complaints when he found flaws in construction or poor testing that violated ODOT's own specifications for construction.

"We weren't following the program as the program was outlined," he said.  "And we were starting to shortcut on test procedures and do things not according to specifications."

It is a claim that ODOT flatly denies.

"ODOT does not ignore test results," said ODOT Spokesman Peter Murphy.  "We adhere to standards.  We perform according to those standards and we don't see anybody cutting corners."

Murphy said Perry is a former employee whose claims are nonsense.

"If you have confidence in Mr. Perry, that's up to you to decide and it's up to the folks out there to decide if they have confidence in Mr. Perry as well," he said.

But Perry has been keeping records of bad road work for more than 10 years and he said his bosses made it clear what the goals were.

"We need to get the job done now and get out of the road so the cars can have it," he said. "It's 'We've got this money and we've got to spend it and get this job done and who cares? We can come back and in another two or three years, five years and repave it.  Nobody cares. They'll forget how long it really is,"' he explained.

Perry said he started seeing problems in 1998 when ODOT was building a bridge over the Crooked River north of Terrebonne.  He showed us cracks that he said are evidence of faulty work. 

Perry has reports that he said he wrote at the time that stated ODOT was using poor materials and subpar compaction.

Over time, on a poorly compacted road, the asphalt and fill give way to weight, water and temperature changes.  Areas of poor compaction begin to sink and those areas where the materials are denser stay the same.  The result is a wavy road.

"When you get 105,000 pounds bouncing down the highway because of poor construction, it's just doing nothing but tearing everything up," said Perry.

In other cases, Perry said roads break down more quickly than they should, leading to potholes and rough roads - all from faulty materials under the asphalt (including tires and trees), bad asphalt and poor compaction.

Perry said he found all of these types of problems when he did his testing and that every one of his reports was pretty much ignored.

In another example, Perry said he found problems with a piece of equipment used to test the density of construction materials.  When he showed his findings, he said his boss retested the equipment.

In Perry's test, one section failed.  In the re-test, that section passed but the numbers in the other sections remained identical to those in Perry's test.

We talked to the manufacturer of the equipment who told us that having only one set of numbers change is impossible.  All of the numbers would change during a re-test, not just one section. You can review the reports here.  Column 100 on each page is where the numbers differ.

"You can say what you want about it but from ODOT's perspective, we don't falsify numbers like that," said Murphy.  "We just don't."

"Somebody needs to hold ODOT accountable for giving the taxpayers what the taxpayers deserve," said Perry.

Murphy said someone did hold ODOT accountable.  The Secretary of State's Office did a review after Perry's complaint and found '...issues appeared to be isolated incidents that had minimal impact on the overall quality of the road construction projects.' You can read the entire review here.

We have confirmed that the FBI has questioned a number of people, including ODOT employees.  The FBI is involved because federal transportation money is used on many of the highway projects in question.