Will we ever sophisticate up the corruption?

I feel like we're never gonna live up to Robert Cerasoli's one time aspirations.  In fact, the rest of the country is doing stupider and stupider corruption to catch up with us. It was supposed to be the other way around. Anyway, our home grown grifters are as dumb as they ever were.

Auditors were also not given five requested contracts to see whether the nonprofit had followed the Louisiana Public Bid Law, nor did they receive board meeting minutes to show if the contracts were approved by the board.

The group’s board president, Rev. Charles Southall III spent $1,514 on meals at restaurants in New Orleans and Baton Rouge in six months starting in July 2016. This year, auditors wrote that the school’s accounting policies and procedures manual “does not contain any policies on credit card control, allowable business use, documentation requirements, required approvers or monitoring credit card usage.”

Southall did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

When it came to federal funding, auditors found the group “incurred significant operating losses” last school year. That wasn’t because those grants were cut but because the school wasn’t keeping up with its federal reimbursement paperwork.

“The school was not sending in budget revisions so their federal reimbursements were delayed,” Cryer said. “But because there is no 2019 year then that amount is going to be in question whether they’d get the reimbursement.”

The school was allowed to carry over approximately $164,000 in unused federal reimbursements from last year to this year, but it’s unclear how much of that was used.

Aren't they all fired, though?

Looks like the Harney charter board violated open meetings laws when they moved to fire their principal for questioning the board's (highly questionable, btw) financial practices and for picking a fight with Juan LaFonta or something. But, isn't the whole question moot? I mean if the board itself is already fired, how do they get to fire anybody?

Harney has been under intense scrutiny from the Orleans Parish school district for mounting administrative problems, board composition, finances and other matters.

Days after Superintendent Henderson Lewis Jr. told parents the school would close at the end of the school year because he would not renew its contract, he said he would revoke the embattled charter school’s contract mid-year. If that happens, the district will run Harney directly until it closes at the end of the year.

Sophisticating up the corruption

After all these years of trying to do the new fancy kinds of grifting with all the apps and things, we still find the old standards are the favorites.  

Lewis and Aiken took turns explaining the problems at the small charter school. The school has been plagued by financial mismanagement, Aiken said, noting that the school’s bank statements were addressed to the Carondelet Street church where the board president, the Rev. Charles Southall, serves as pastor. Meanwhile, Southall’s home address in Baton Rouge is the one that Harney listed with the state agency that distributes per-pupil funding to schools, another potential violation.

She also noted the school improperly withheld tens of thousands of dollars in employee retirement contributions for weeks or months and did not fully document credit card expenses.

That's a good old fashioned public school being ripped off by some politically connected preachers right there.  That's the way we used to do things in this city. The quasi-privatization charter hell is just window dressing, really.

It's also got our favorite bank.

In an audit that examined the 2016-17 school year, auditors randomly checked purchases on one credit card statement. They said they couldn’t find receipts to back up two of the three purchases that month.

They also noted that Harney’s accounting handbook had no policy on how to handle credit cards.

In response, school officials sent an undated policy to the district in January. “The school credit card is utilized at the discretion of the Board President,” it said.

The new policy requires charges to be approved by the chief financial officer — the same administrator facing ethics charges.

Monthly statements show the card was issued by First NBC Bank and had a $20,000 credit limit.

“We discontinued doing credit cards in” — Southall paused. “When did the bank close? 2016. At the end of that, that was the end of it.”

First NBC Bank was declared insolvent in April 2017. Weeks earlier, Ashton Ryan Jr., the bank’s president CEO — and a Harney board member —  stepped down from the financial institution.

He remained on the charter board and later asked his name to be removed from financial documents.