Take it from former New Mexico Treasurer Doug Brown, who wrote about his first day on the job in his memoir, My Life in Stories. Here, with permission, is an excerpt.... and it's my reason for supporting Tim Eichenberg for Treasurer. I know Tim from our time in the Senate together and am confident he has the experience and professionalism to never let this happen again......
from Corruption, a chapter in former NM Treasurer Douglas Brown’s My Life in Stories…
“I’d done several corporate turnarounds, but nothing to prepare me for this experience…The NM State Treasurer’s Office had just erupted in scandal. Four former employees would eventually be indicted for various crimes ranging from extortion to conspiracy.… Would I please be willing to fix it?....
…Fact finding was made easy thanks to a thorough investigation by Deloitte & Touche begun months before. The facts they found were anything but easy. The state’s checkbook was out of balance by $160 million, and unreconciled items stretched back over five years. The officer in charge of the banking department had no banking experience. His previous job was as a baggage handler for America West. Only one of my staff of 42 had any previous investment industry experience, and we were running a $5 billion portfolio. There were few controls, little disclosure, and no effective oversight. Investment guidelines, purchasing policies, and personnel policies were routinely ignored. All efforts had been directed to overpaying on commissions and purchases to generate the wherewithal for “campaign contributions.” The agency’s outside auditor was a small firm from the southern part of the state and had for years given the Treasurer’s Office clean opinions with no material weaknesses. That relationship was so cozy that other CPA firms had stopped bothering to bid. I came to appreciate Warren Buffett’s observation that there is seldom just one cockroach in the kitchen.
Now for the scary part. Document shredders had been working overtime. The alarm contacts on doors and windows had been super-glued together to enable after-hours entry. Video cameras had been redirected and videotapes erased. Staff members who were reluctant to go along with these schemes had their personnel evaluations downgraded retroactively. One had her car vandalized. Alerted to this pattern of criminality, I had a detective agency check the premises for telephone bugs. They found five, including one on my phone…
…it became clear that all roads led to a cohort of nine staff members. Several of them were related to the former State Treasurer. Fortunately all but two of them were patronage appointments who could be summarily replaced.
At the staff meeting I assembled to announce the departures, I had expected some regrets… Instead, the news was greeted with a standing ovation….An agency veteran said that this was the first staff meeting that the agency had held during her ten-year career there. The other surprise was that there was no extra burden of work despite a reduction of over 20% of the workforce. That rogue group had been doing nothing but making mischief. “
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