Retrospection (extremely long)

Twidget · Jun 17, 2005

After listening to the radio, reading responses and considering my own thoughts about the Jackson verdict, I have done some soul searching. My wife was the victim of a media circus, on a very small scale next to Jackson, but the truth was very hard to find in any of the stories. She was an accountant for a small town. She was hired purely as an accountant, the City Secretary was also the Treasurer. The City Secretary was responsible for updating the Mayor and City Council about everything financial. During the years she worked for this town, she caught the D.A.R.E officer stealing, the City Secretary taking a city credit card and buying thousands of dollars worth of building supplies and his replacement trying to rig an election. Non of these people were prosecuted, the first two were allowed to resign, the third they did nothing about. The election rigging City Secretary was friends with the Mayor, so it was pushed under the rug. None of this has a direct link to my story, I just wanted to give an overview of the way this town was run. The town had old PCs that the hard drives were dying in. The vendor that had experience with municipal software submitted a bid. The Mayor didnt like the owner of the company, so she went with a company that had no experience with municipal accounting software. The mayor signed the receipt stating the equipment was up and running before it was even delivered. It didnt work at all. People were getting water bills that ranged from $0 to $500. No one knew what was going on. My wife approached the Mayor about using the old system to verify the accuracy of the new one and was told that she was not to use the old system. My wife had no idea how much money was in any account at any time. To compound the problem, the City Council was full of people with grand ideas about how to spend the tax revenues. They refused to stop spending until things settled down with the computer system. Needless to say, the bank the city used had a good computer system. They started bouncing city checks left and right. The bank paid them, then the city owed the bounce charge and the original money. Not a good situation. How did the city resolve the problem? Well the Mayor and City Secretary/Treasurer were buds, so it wasnt them. It was my wife. They fired her and then went to the paper with stories about how the accountant had let the city run into debt. The paper didnt bother to research the facts, they just printed what they were told, never even trying to contact my wife. To this day, there are people in that town that think my wife shafted them, she is afraid to go near it. The really sad part is the flow of money started with the Council, went to the Mayor for approval, the accountant (my wife) to record. The City Secretary/Treasurer was responsible for reporting balances to the Council. No research whatsoever by the papers. Sorry for the length of this, I just wanted to finally get the full story out somewhere after 15 years.