Abita Springs finance director under criminal investigation

I saw this story last night....there's a part 2 tonight that is going to expose more people

Amazing no matter how low level you can get in a government position there will ALWAYS be corruption

auditors only do a sample so even if they did select one of the questionable transactions she could easily cover it up with a fake invoice

it should have been caught in house

what they should have done is look at vendors that looked suspicious and they would have easily caught it

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Amazing no matter how low level you can get in a government position there will ALWAYS be corruption

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If you could magically hire 100 Lee Zurich types and turn them loose to look for corruption, I firmly believe that every parish council, sheriff’s dept, police dept, school board, etc in this air dry arse state would have corruption. Lots of credit card misuse such as this and vendor kickbacks would be shown.

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Curious what the auditors have to say.

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I know the answer. The person who wrote the article is an idiot.

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According to the 2022 audit, CPA firm Ericksen Krentel reviewed the town’s credit cards and found no exceptions, meaning no problems.

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"No exception" does not mean "no problems." It means they selected a sample of purchases and didn't find any exceptions. Auditors don't perform a forensic examination on every transaction.

For most municipalities, $105,000 would not be material to the financial statements. This wouldn't move the needle during a financial audit. This is why good internal controls are important. This should have been caught by her supervisors.

ETA:

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“If any auditor were to just scan this list it seems like all sorts of red flags should have gone up,” Collins said.

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“Well, if they hired an independent auditor to come and do an internal audit, yes, then they failed in doing their job because they should have caught it,” Collins said.

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Does this dude own a competing accounting firm or something? Would be no other reason to come to such a stupid conclusion.

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I agree the total value isn’t something that would be a flag, but some of those companies on the statements should have raised flags

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Well sure, if they happened to pull one of those statements. Auditors don't usually pull every credit card statement.

Also, most of the charges mentioned wouldn't have moved the needle even if they did pull that statement. An auditor would skip right over a small charge to DoorDash and would only give a $97 charge to a sex shop a second look if they knew it was a sex shop. I personally have never heard of "Edens Fantasy" so that trivial charge would have meant nothing to me. We're not going through every statement line by line and googling every vendor.

:GOAC:

The only thing that matters here is what is the race and what sex do they claim?

Just like Tiffany Henyard of Dolton. She is a black female and straight up spends the towns money anyway she wants and goes after anyone that goes against her and it doesn’t matter.

Why? She is a black female.

Same as Latoya. Other than murder someone on tv, not one single thing will happen

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This woman, being Finance Director, clearly knew how to get around what the auditors would be looking for.

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100% this. Back in my audit days, I could not tell you how many times the contact person couldn't find a specific credit card statement I needed but was able to provide me with others that would allow me to hit my sampling metrics. We would just mark the file saying we could not locate, then enter the new information and move on with "no exceptions".

As pointed out earlier, the financial statement auditors are not combing through every single statement. They are looking at a list of every credit card, and most likely pulling a few samples trying to get at least 1 from each card. And as long as they meet the threshold for that sampling population; they move on to the next sample.