Does Chester need an outside auditor?

On October 11, 2013, I posted Shredder Gate in City Hall where councilman Nichols accused the former republican administration of shredding financial documents before leaving office in 2011 and demonstrated this by presenting a bag full of shreds in front of a city council audience. 

On October 19, 2013, I posted a letter from Shep Garner, a councilman in that previous administration who took umbrage to Shredder Gate expressing his amazement at how the new administration continue to attack the previous administration 22 months after leaving office. 

It was pretty quiet around here until February 5 of this year when I posted Was Chester’s credit rating suspended? Actually, the silence continued as no one responded to that post. But, on February 19 the Community Spirit paper issued an article confirming that the credit rating was suspended and relied on Shep Garner for comments because calls to the Director of Accounts, Finance & Human Resources Nafis Nichols went unreturned. Garner said that the city should be working on the 2013 audit now and wasn’t sure if the 2012 audit had been completed yet. 

On February 20, Delcotimes.com wrote about the credit suspension and this time the Mayor did comment but he said it won’t ‘overly impact the finances of the city in a negative way.’ He also made hints to Shredder Gate stating, ‘city administration was working to track down documents that were lost in the transition from one administration to the next.’ 

In my opinion, if they haven’t found documents from 2010 by now, it’s not likely they’ll be found at all. Either you take your best guess of what the numbers were and move on or you’ll spend the rest of your career stuck in the past. 

Maybe that’s what the mayor means when he says, ‘I am working on establishing the appropriate partnerships to propose the most effective business model for the city, that will eliminate these issues in our future.’

If the existing staff can get it done, I recommend calling in an outside auditor right away. The longer they wait, the worse it gets.