Gainesville schools off by “just” $33M

Just when you thought that $9M was a bad, now we are up to $33M in budget adjustments… but that is just through 2007.  It will take auditors another few weeks to fix the books for 2007!  Even the auditors don’t know if the school system is in a deficit or not.  Don’t they have last month’s bank statement?  That might provide a clue don’t you think?

Read the story in The Times here–>Audit of Gainesville schools results in $33M worth of adjustments.  

When you read news remember that good writers learn the importance of primacy and recency.  The reader tends to remember what you read/hear last (recency) followed by what you read/heard first (primacy).  Those presenting information to you will attempt to put the most important points in those two positions, with the rest of the stuff sandwiched in between.  That way the story looks like it tells both sides, but if one side is at the beginning and the end, you are more likely to just remember that side.  That last paragraph of the story was too silly for printing.  Who cares what the auditor thinks about what the people who are responsible for this mess think?  What else is the auditor going to say to the paper before they are finished with the audit?  They are accountants (I hope!)

I had appointed criminal case once where the Defendant though he wasn’t legally responsible for selling crack cocaine.  An undercover officer asked the defendant for the crack and he got some crack from a drug dealer and gave the crack to the cop who gave him the money and then gave all the money to the drug dealer.  Since he didn’t make a profit, and he was asked to get the crack by the cop, he reasoned in his own mind that he did not commit a criminal act of sale of cocaine.  He was wrong. 

People who commit malfeasance or misfeasance in public office often convince themselves they are in the right because they are owed what they took.  People who commit nonfeasance in public office are too lazy to know what they did wrong so they think they are in the right.  You often hear them cry out: “But I did the best job I could.”  When you are entrusted with public money and public trust and our children, the only job that is good enough is a flawless job that follows all the proper procedures and is completely reasonable under the circumstances.

In the Gainesville City School fiasco we KNOW that some money is missing.  We KNOW that the accounting practices are horrible.  We KNOW that expert financial auditors don’t know what is going on yet and they need WEEKS to figure it out.  We KNOW the school board is going to raise taxes to pay for the mess.  We KNOW that all the time the quarter-million-dollar-man and his staff have been getting money and writing checks and making the bad entries into the accounting system every day.  We KNOW the same people who caused the mess are still at work making almost $1,000 per day.  Wouldn’t you hang out and “cooperate” for $1,000 per day too?  Especially if you had a $.5M golden parachute?  Besides I never had a white collar criminal case where the Defendant didn’t have a well thought out story before he/she was arrested.  You can’t be a good “con man” unless you are a convincing and engaging actor.