Two top officials in the District of Columbia’s finance office have refused to sign off on a private consultant’s audit that gave their office a clean bill of fiscal health, according to a school source and government documents.
Pamela Graham, the financial officer assigned to the District’s troubled school system, and Abinet Belachew, the schools’ comptroller, are balking because of their concern that the consultant failed to criticize the finance office while lambasting the schools, the school source said.
The source spoke on condition of anonymity because of a fear of retribution from supervisors.
D.C. Chief Finance Officer Natwar Gandhi held a news conference on Jan. 31, when BDO Seidman LLP’s review of the District’s finances was published. Gandhi said that his office had once again received a flawless audit.
But the source said, and government documents show, that BDO auditors gathered information for the audit as recently as a week ago.
Belachew and other officials raised concerns that the auditors laid the blame for systemic problems at the schools’ doorstep in order to protect Gandhi’s reputation, according to the source and government documents.
Belachew and others also asked about BDO’s apparently cozy relationship with executives in the finance office.
Gandhi has used a decade’s worth of clean reviews — most of them from BDO Seidman — as a defense against critics who say he turns a blind eye to the corruption and waste in city agencies he monitors.
The schools, meanwhile, are at their lowest ebb in decades. Years of scandal and waste have damaged the standing of current Superintendent Clifford Janey, and Mayor Adrian Fenty has proposed that the city take over the schools.
Janey has told his staff he feels ambushed by BDO’s audit, the source said and documents show.
Belachew stormed out of the school’s finance office last Thursday after he and Graham met with Gandhi’s top lieutenant, Anthony Pompa, the source said.
Pompa told the pair that he would have other finance office executives respond to BDO Seidman’s audit, the source said. Belachew’s secretary said he didn’t return to work on Friday. He was in the office Monday, but his secretary said he was in a meeting.
Pompa did not respond to requests for comment. Finance office spokeswoman Maryann Young described the source’s version of events as “patently false.”
She did not respond to requests to make Graham or Belachew available for an interview.
BDO spokesman Jerry Walsh sent an e-mail statement Friday denying that BDO was still working on the audit.
“BDO never provided any assurances to anyone in the D.C. government regarding the findings of its audit,” Walsh said in his e-mail. “Any statements to the contrary are factually inaccurate and we would question the motives [of] anyone making such statements.”
The Examiner has made a Freedom of Information Act request for copies of all communications between BDO and finance office employees. The finance office has not responded to the request.
Despite numerous scandals in the city’s schools, there are nagging questions about BDO’s criticisms. One of the major problems BDO cited, for instance, was that the U.S. Department of Education had labeled D.C. schools “high risk” for federal funds because of shoddy accounting practices.
The Department of Education attached the label in 2006, but relied on information gathered in 2003 and 2004. BDO was only supposed to review the practices for fiscal 2006. The audit does not say whether the problems cited by the government continued into that year.
Another shoddy accounting practice cited by the Department of Education — and recycled into the BDO audit — was the schools’ failure to submit audit reports on time. The audit reports are supposed to be done by independent agencies like BDO.
D.C.’s finance office gives those independent agencies their deadlines.
Barely two weeks after BDO gave Gandhi its sparkling review, the U.S. Government Accountability Office issued a scathing audit of the city’s contract and procurement systems and blasted the finance office for not doing more to gain control over the system.
The audit found the finance office had authorized some 11,000 vouchers, worth more than $217 million, that violated rules on procurement.
The GAO report included Gandhi’s comments. He took “very strong exception” to the findings and said the GAO didn’t understand his agency’s position.
Anyone with information on the city finance office can call The Examiner at 202-459-4956.
