Legal News

City Controller Audit Finds Board of Ethics' Lack of Minutes, Lack of Funding

By Brian Harris

By Amaris Elliott-Engel
Of the Legal Staff

City Controller Alan Butkovitz said that an audit of the Philadelphia Board of Ethics for the 2008-09 fiscal year found that the board does not have a record of holding public sessions on hiring and setting salaries for executive staff.

In a news release, Butkovitz said the audit did not find any public session minutes for meetings in which the board either announced that it would meet in executive session on hiring or setting the salaries for the board's executive director, general counsel and other employees, or public session minutes of meetings in which such discussions were held.

The audit states: "Public-session minutes include little evidence of compliance with the Home Rule Charter provision that the board appoint staff, define their duties, and fix their compensation. Much of this activity reportedly took place in executive sessions, but the minutes of these meetings were not available for audit inspection due to confidentiality issues."

The audit also found that the still-young board has not been able to reach full staffing because "funds for professional services dwindled to a fraction of their original level."

In the response to the audit, J. Shane Creamer, the board's executive director, said the board disagrees that it did not document its personnel actions. Creamer said he and the other employees were not present in executive session when the board made personnel discussions, and executive session minutes could not be provided to the auditors because of confidentiality issues.

The City Controller's office said in its final response that the controller's staff should not have had to conduct interviews with board members in order to find out how personnel decisions were carried out. "We recognize the need for public bodies to conduct certain business in executive session ... But once the discussions have stopped and decisions have been made, those decisions should be affirmed in public," auditors wrote.

Butkovitz concluded in a news release that the lack of minutes showed that the board has not followed the state and local procedures required by law for public meetings and executive sessions, amounting to violations of the state Sunshine Act, the City Charter and the Philadelphia Code.

Creamer also wrote that some mistakes found in the audit were because of "inadvertent mistakes by our inexperienced staff."

Full post as published by The Legal Intelligencer Blog on September 15, 2010 (boomark / email).