I finally got around to looking at the long-overdue audit for the city of Columbus this week.
Turns out, Milton Rawle was a bargain.
Oh, sure, maybe he did skim a little taxpayer money off the top from time to time, about $290,000 is the best guess.
But, hey, we live in a state where Brett Favre can siphon more than $6 million in federal welfare funds entrusted to the state and Gov. Tate Reeves’ personal trainer, Paul Lacoste, can dip into those same welfare funds to the tune of another $1-million-plus.Unlike Rawle, Favre and Lacoste are still walking around scot-free and Reeves, for some inexplicable reason, is running for a second term as governor.
Poor Milton, meanwhile, is doing a 20-year stretch.
The city’s 2020 audit, performed by the accounting firm Watkins, Ward and Stafford, showed the city overspent its budget for that fiscal year by a whopping $3.2 million. The city’s 2021 audit has yet to be completed, but don’t expect the news to be any better. Heck, it might be even worse.
Wanda Holley of Watkins, Ward and Stafford, didn’t pull any punches when sharing the firm’s findings during Tuesday’s city council meeting.
The overspending, she said, was the result of sloppy bookkeeping by inexperienced or poorly-trained personnel in the city’s accounting department, a lack of systems to correctly capture and categorize expenditures and a failure to follow through on the systems adopted to guard against malfeasance that surfaced during Rawles’ time as CFO.
Malfeasance is bad, but incompetence is more costly, at least in this instance.
The metaphorical elephant in the room as Holley shared her findings was Deliah Vaughn, who served as the city’s CFO from May 2019 until September 2021. It might be unfair to lay the blame for this fiasco entirely at Vaughn’s feet, but accountability starts at the top, even though her name was never mentioned Tuesday.
I think Vaughn is a nice lady and well-intentioned. I also think it’s pretty clear she just wasn’t up to the job.
If there is a silver lining in all of this, it’s that it appears the city now has someone who is.
In March, the city hired James Brigham as its new CFO. Since arriving, Brigham has thrown himself into the chaos and has been diligently working to get the city’s finances on firm footing. He has the confidence of the mayor and, I suspect, most of the citizens, too.
There is an important lesson to be gleaned from how Vaughn and Brigham arrived in Columbus, one The Dispatch has often stressed over and over again when the city hires department leaders.
Often, the hiring process is the predictor of performance. The expression “garbage in, garbage out” is an indelicate way of describing a poor practice, but not inaccurate in many cases.
Vaughan was hired in May 2019 from a field of just six applicants and was only one of two applicants who met the minimum requirements established by the council. She came to Columbus after three years as Tunica County Healthcare Authority Controller and had served as Tunica County controller before that. That’s a pretty skimpy resume for so important a position.
Compare that process to the one that resulted in Brigham’s hiring.
Brigham was chosen from a field of more than 40 applicants. He had more than 30 years working in both the public and private sector. He is a certified public accountant, a certified internal auditor and a certified fraud examiner. He also is certified in financial forensics.
Inevitably, the city will again need to hire a department head.
Let’s hope the city council has learned something from these two hires.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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