A control problem

Walter J. Kucharski knows by now the feeling of fatigued parent, having repeatedly given correction to a hearer who paid no heed. The state auditor of public accounts four times has cited Waynesboro Treasurer Sandra Dixon for the same failings and yet the failings have persisted. No running in the house and, hey, watch those internal controls. Dixon appears oblivious.
The city has received still another missive from Kucharski as part of an annual rite of auditing four city agencies’ collection of state money. Three of those agencies met the state auditor’s standards. A fourth, the Treasurer’s Office run by Dixon, again did not. “The Treasurer continues to not maintain sufficient internal control over state funds or comply with state laws and regulations,” Kucharski wrote in an Aug. 21 letter to Mayor Tim Williams. The acoustics of the letter were fabulous, if one measures such things by an echo’s precision. “The Treasurer did not maintain sufficient internal control over state funds,” Kucharski wrote to Williams in a letter a year earlier. There is a difference in two more letters Kucharski authored in 2006 and 2007. Those are addressed to ex-Mayor Tom Reynolds. Otherwise, the references to the treasurer and that blasted “internal control” are identical. Clean that room.
Since Dixon won the treasurer election in 2005, her office has bungled the handling of roughly $400,000 in city and state money, failing to remit in a timely manner $300,000 in state tax collections and other fees. The city has lost more than $55,000 in revenue and interest income because of similar failings. It once was worse. “Poor physical controls over cash in the Treasurer’s office” in 2005 set the table for more than $25,000 in thefts of city and state money, according to a local auditor. A judge subsequently sentenced former Deputy Treasurer Jennifer C. Kennedy to six months in jail for embezzlement.
Five months later in a letter to Reynolds, Kucharski returned to the subject of that infernal “internal control.” “These inadequacies,” he wrote, “have lead [sic] to prior improprieties and misappropriation of funds and the current situation could allow these problems to continue.” Translation: Somebody could rob the city blind. Or better: Ms. Dixon, clean your room. Please.
Fortuitously for the city, Dixon has an opponent in the upcoming treasurer election. She is Stephanie Beverage. Less fortuitous, Beverage declared bankruptcy in 1997, hardly an indictment but not the sort of thing one seeks on a treasurer’s resume.
Voters are tasked with determining what to do from here. Some hope for help from the City Council, but officials are powerless to assist. A circuit court can remove an elected official for “neglect of duty” or incompetence, but that requires a petition signed by 457 people, or 10 percent of the number who voted in the ‘05 treasurer’s race.
A more expedient mechanism exists. Think of the election as “internal control” for voters. Parents know they sometimes have to clean the room themselves.