"EXACTLY! That's a whole pizza and a couple beers EVERY WEEK! And all they have to do is show up to a multi-hour meeting every single week and risk some dumbass making a big deal to the whole damn world about them not providing a bible to give an oath over! These corrupt bastards! I have to work for like 10 minutes for those benefits every week! These corrupt bastards!!1!" - HN tonight
You posted over 50 flamewar comments in this thread. That's egregious, and we ban accounts that behave this way. I'm not going to ban you right now, but please don't do it again.
We want curious conversation here. When you get to the point of fulminating about what "HN" has been saying, or you feel "HN" has been saying, the thread has left the path of curiosity a long time ago, and is well into the brush. We don't want that here.
I'm not saying your views are wrong (I have no idea what they are, and no idea what the situation is). But if your views are correct, this is the worst way to advocate for them, because it discredits them. No more of this, please.
Well, if their pilfering town funds by 'employing' the surpivisors brother-in-law's landscaping company for 8x the normal cost...
I'm not saying that's the case, it's a made up scenario, but it's exactly how underpaid public servants "make up the difference", and it's why you need an auditor. The hired CPA wouldn't see anything wrong.
$1.66mm seems like a lot for a traffic signal at an intersection. I’m sure an auditor could find a at least a few interesting items to dig in to and validate.
Good thing that the township retained an actual CPA, then. It'd be sketch as hell if a fucking sci-fi author slash real estate agent was in charge of an audit.
Yes we all know that auditing firms are never thoroughly corrupt/incompetent, nobody could have foreseen Enron or Lehman Brothers (or loads of smaller scale cases)...
Oh come on. Nobody said it never happens, but do you have any reason to suspect Maher Dussel is corrupt or incompetent? Do you have any reason to believe this random guy is as qualified as a team of CPAs to audit public sector books?
He's probably not more qualified, but independent oversight of public expenditures serves a valuable purpose. A hired accountant has no incentive to point out that it might be wasteful or unnecessary to spend Y money on a thing X as long as everything is done by the book.
With government, the FIRST place you look are benefits to employees.
In this case, they are paying $570,906 in 2022 in Pension benefits for 4 active employees. Now they certainly aren't paying $142,726.50 to each active employee so that means they have a string of retired workers that they're paying a good amount of money for.
An appropriate thing for an auditor to do is to then research how those employees earned their benefits. Did they "buy 15 years of tenure" for $3,200 thereby increasing their yearly benefit $40,000 per year? Did they "work" 120 hours per week of overtime in their last year to jack up their final year salary? These are real examples from a town near me.
None of these things are illegal and won't necessarily be flagged by a CPA who is being paid by the people giving or receiving these benefits. But they sure stand out to taxpayers who are footing the bill!
Think about it - all a CPA will do is check to make sure a supervisor signed off that someone worked 120 hours of overtime. They aren't going to investigate how that is even possible or likely.
wait wait. You're saying they do this thankless job for the pure joy of civic duty? They get nothing out of their position? And so... because they're so pure and selfless, it's fine if they never seat a duly elected auditor? What?
No. I'm saying that they will definitely seat the auditor and that the elected auditor is being a dick instead of being a reasonable person about his situation and the fact that his interlocutors are mostly just confused.
Let’s also not forget that Person C does not seem to know anything themselves about the rules and procedures.
They just showed up at the next meeting hoping everyone had everything figured out for them.
I find the entire attitude here extremely interesting, because it’s most likely a repudiation of their preconceived ideas. The idea that there is this singular powerful “establishment” that has all the power and works hard to keep outsiders from breaking up their way of doing things.
What this episode really shows is that government in the US is singularly disorganized, driven by largely a whole bunch of self interested individuals, who are largely winging it as they go along.
If indeed it was the “establishment” that was so worried about this auditor position, why would they not put up a better fight to win the election in the first place? The actual winner seems surprised they won, which indicates they didn’t put much effort in campaigning. The “establishment” surely has enough money to run a campaign in a tiny town to win the election?
Further, if the “establishment” was so scared of this individual and so powerful, why would they do something silly like basically say something that is contrary to the law over email? They’d probably be better off just ignoring him and/or having an attorney come up with a legally plausible communication that would have conveyed that he isn’t likely to be seated without doing so in a manner that is apparently contrary to the clear law.
> They just showed up at the next meeting hoping everyone had everything figured out for them.
So what? He turned up, and they said they'd swear him in, then sent a letter saying they wouldn't. If the first auditor was not needed, why not mention that at the meeting?
It's also not clear the "rules and procedures" are being followed here - it appears normal to swear in Auditors after their election, is it unreasonable to expect that process to be figured out beforehand?
I've served on councils like this before and if anything unexpected comes up, the default answer is always going to be "uhh we're not sure but we'll address it at the next meeting." Sometimes someone may know the answer but more often than not the manager or solicitor will get the answer before the next caucus meeting and they'll formulate the actual response then.
They didn't defer addressing the issue, they said they'd swear him in. Also, since they had been operating without an elected auditor since the last time they elected one, did no one there know this?
> and they'll formulate the actual response then
How long should he wait until he can officially conclude he's being given the run-around?
So, it's okay that they refuse to swear in the elected auditors because you think the position is unimportant? In what other circumstances do you think it's okay for government entities to ignore the law?
The auditors have duties beside auditing, and the law[1] explicitly say they "shall perform the other duties of the office" even if an accountant has been appointed. There is clearly a reason the town government dosen't want anyone to preform one or more of these other duties.
> The supervisors assured me that I would be able to swear in at either the next meeting
> three days after that meeting, I received an email from the township manager to the effect of, "sorry, we hired a CPA to do that job and we have no need for elected auditors to oversee the township."
Is seems these town meetings are roughly 3 weeks apart, and he has contacted various people who have not returned his call. The previous auditor (elected) describes as being given a "runaround" also.
So yes, they didn't refuse, they just ghosted his attempts to resolve the issue. What's the big difference? As long as they stay silent, they technically didn't refuse? At what point can you say they are acting in bad-faith?
Noted. I've never gotten involved in local politics but friends who have seem to have nothing but stories of batshit crazies coming out of the woodwork for the past two years. So this is what that looks like? But giving him the benefit of the doubt that he means to do the job, how is he supposed to request the books for an audit if the council won't acknowledge his position?
I can assure you "the past two years" are irrelevant, I've been involved with politics at various levels since 2004 and local politics are almost exclusively the domain of people unqualified and uninterested in anything else.
That doesn't even approach answering my question. You're just saying he did things wrong, which is not what I was asking about: why you said he'd 'definitely' be seated.
