Curmudgeon's Corner
cur-mud-geon: anyone who hates hypocrisy and pretense and has the temerity to say so; anyone with the habit of pointing out unpleasant facts in an engaging and humorous manner
MATC Board Unaware of Need for Audits?
As the saga of the MATC employee and her use of an MATC credit card for personal purposes continues to unfold, the revelation that no audits had been performed for a decade is astounding. John Williams, the new VP of Finance at MATC, who came on board in July, 2010, ordered a routine audit soon after making that discovery. That audit resulted in the discovery of the theft that had been routine for seven years. The audit found that the woman accused is suspected of running up more than $10,000 per MONTH in illegal charges.
The now-retired former VP of Finance at MATC at the time was Michael Sargent. I wonder why he hadn't insisted on a routine audit during that entire period of time? Where was the Board of Directors whose job was oversight? Who was supposed to be looking over Sargent's shoulder? These are questions that may never be answered because they probably will never be asked by the right people of those who had these responsibilities.
I am reminded that this institution is run by people whom we never have the opportunity to review via the polling booth and yet this institution collects millions of tax dollars annually from those of us who live in its taxing area. We in Germantown remember that we were paying something on the order of $4 to $5 million in taxes when we had something less than 60 students, either part-time or full-time, attending MATC. Some of us thought then that we were not getting our money's worth.
If this incident isn't sufficient to get the blood of our elected representatives boiling so that change can be made to happen, then probably nothing will ever happen to change MATC. I know that such change is a long process but there must be accountability of one kind or another. The stockholders of a corporation would rightly seek the dismissal of a senior officer who didn't conduct an audit on a routine basis. Is it only because these were tax dollars that people tend to look the other way?
The woman who has been accused of this action will pay some price if she is convicted. But those to whom she reported seem able to simply retire and never have to be concerned again about what they didn't do that could've prevented this from beginning, and certainly could've found that it was going on somewhere short of seven years. And the person or persons to whom the former VP of Finance reported ought to be paying a price for their malfeasance.
Thank goodness the new VP of Finance saw that this was neglectful and ordered a routine audit soon after arriving a MATC.
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