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Nick Jimenez

Nick Jimenez, Caller-Times editor, writes a weekly editorial column Sundays. He can be reached at 361-886-3787 or jimenezn@caller.com.

Sunday, December 19, 1999

Accounting was worse than sloppy

The first shoe dropped at the Corpus Christi Independent School District when the board received the report from the Texas Education Agency on its audit of spending practices by the board and Supt. Abe Saavedra.
   The report amounted to a confirmation of what has generally been charged. If the board were taking an academic standards test in financial record-keeping, the members would now be in remedial studies.
   Receipts? What receipts?
   Judging by the report's writers, the TEA auditors must have been scratching their heads trying to figure how anyone could have kept track of who spent what and why. The report had a variation of ways of posing the question, "Say what?"
  

  • "In several instances, the auditors were neither able to determine the number of individuals dining nor the business purpose for the meals because adequate documentation was not on file."
      
  • ". . . without adequate supporting documentation, the auditors were not able to determine whether the second individual occupying the hotel room was traveling on official school-related business."
      
  • "In several instances, no receipts or only partial receipts were submitted for travel expenses for board members."
      
  • ? "In many instances, expenses for travel costs for board members appeared to be questionable because of adequate accounting of all travel costs per individual board member including American Express charges were not on file."
       There was more, but you get the picture.
       Unlike thousands, nay tens of thousands, of business travelers who slave away for hours reconciling travel expense reports with scores of itty-bitty receipts and chits, then playing Ping-Pong with corporate accounting departments before the green eyeshade gods are satiated, the board pretty much seems to have blown accountability off.
       Maybe that's because board members only have to face the voters. Woe to them if they had to confront the steely-eyed face of an accounting department clerk with a gap in his financial records and an itchy finger on the e-mail "send" button to higher-ups. But enough about me.
       So far the board and Saavedra is trying to wrestle with the charge of either being inattentive, asleep at the wheel or just plain failing to care. The question of criminal intent is on the table of District Attorney Carlos Valdez' desk. That shoe is dangling, but hasn't fallen yet.
       The shame of it is that CCISD is a good school district, even a darned good one by the judgment of many folks. All the usual benchmarks of test grades, report cards and state assessments says that the district is in better academic shape than it has been in a long time. And a great deal of the credit goes to Saavedra.
       OK, you don't win battles without all the soldiers doing their job, and the teachers, the principals and counselors are winning in the trenches of education. Still, the generals point the way.
       If there was a mistake made by Saavedra, perhaps it was in the acceptance of the status quo. The questionable board meals after meetings, the habit of a lick and a promise on board travel reports; the record of sloppy bookkeeping evidently preceded Saavedra's tenure.
       The advantage of hiring someone such as Saavedra who has spent his virtual career with CCISD is that he knows the nuances of the system and how to make it work. The pitfall is that an insider may look for the failings of the system without seeing them, so accustomed has he become to the landscape.
       (Nick Jimenez can be reached by phone at 886-3787 or by e-mail at jimenezn@caller.com.)
      
      

     
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