Santa Fe unveiled an embarrassing fraud review

[TexasTowelie]

The response—an official one—is coming. Sometime. There's still an awful lot to do.

This past weekend marked seven months since the city of Santa Fe shamefacedly, albeit publicly, let its citizens know that things were not well when it comes to handling cash, tracking money and making sure no one's up to anything untoward with city finances.

On September 28, 2017, the city manager, finance director, attorney and public information officer gathered together a group of three reporters—one from each of the newspapers in town—and explained that the city had hired McHard Accounting Consulting to assess Santa Fe's financial procedures with an eye toward fraud prevention.

They suspected things were amiss. The three-woman team at McHard handed them a report that said things were worse than that.

City ledgers were full of temporary fixes that belied a general mystery behind cash handling and other ways to track city money. The processes for balancing the city's books were fraught with opportunities to fudge the numbers. Too many people had too much access to a computer system that is hopelessly outdated and designed not for government work, but for a manufacturing company. Improperly trained employees had created workarounds that were needlessly complex and stunningly exposed to fraud. The accounts payable division showed thousands more vendors than Santa Fe has residents.

Read more: https://www.sfreporter.com/news/coverstories/2018/05/02/cant-mchardly-wait/