Pamela & Louise
It’s like going to the movies. Salisbury’s own desperate duo is on the loose and the city’s finances are headed for a trip over the abyss. Pamela first; Louise to follow.
Pamela Oland is the Internal Services Director. Hired as Finance Director in a less than transparent fashion slightly less than two years back, she was touted in the mayor’s hiring announcement as a CPA (Certified Public Accountant), a graduate of the Wharton School, a Senior Internal Auditor at Perdue, a former Vice-President of Finance at Magellan Health (a large national health services vendor), and as an Experienced Senior Accountant at Arthur Andersen. (Anderson is the former accounting powerhouse now linked with the Enron collapse; employment there declined from about 85,000 to about 200 currently). On paper, she sounded qualified, except for any mention of public administration or municipal work.
At her employment, she was charged with keeping track of utility billings, A/P and A/R, payroll and investments, and advising the Mayor and City Council on finance and investment topics. Each of these areas was apparently under satisfactory control by her predecessors.
From the outset she appeared nervous as a cat during each and every televised proceeding; her body language did not square with her claimed expertise.
She missed the first audit deadline under her administration by a mile; her superiors explained this away by virtue of her being new on the job and having vacancies to fill in order to get the work done. It was a grossly inadequate explanation at the time, but certainly a bellwether of what was to follow. In plain language, she did not hit the ground running, and appears consistently not to have communicated the status of her efforts and needs to the mayor, city administrator or city council. Some management and process whiz!
Last year’s audit, even later than its predecessor, brought more of the same excuses and lack of performance, without the ability to claim “I just got here”.
In a fuzzy, little publicized move, during the past year she was rewarded for these inadequacies by gaining oversight of the city’s nascent Human Resources operation. The city had contracted its HR function out to the county for quite some time, for an annual fee of around $100,000 or so; a bargain in retrospect. So having displayed continuing inability to perform in her area of ‘expertise’, she was rewarded by being given another sandbox to play in.
Now comes, finally, the audit for the fiscal year 2006-2007; each gestation period longer than its predecessor. The same old tired excuses are being proffered by the Mayor and City Administrator for its tardiness. Reading through the Management Letter does not require a magnifying glass. Multiple accounts are not being posted in a timely manner. Reconciliations are tardy, if done at all. Significant sums of money were not being tracked at all. Monies budgeted to one account are commonly being spent for others, and so on. If you’ve been to the big city and seen street hustlers moving the walnuts around, you have seen all you need to know about Pam’s game.
One of the compelling attributes of Eastern Shoremen and Shorewomen is being plain spoken. This level of ineptitude is just beyond belief! @#$%&*
Oland is not listed as a CPA on the city website for her department. CPA is a hard earned designation, and it possessors are generally proud for folks to know of their peer recognition and licensure. What gives? One commenter elsewhere surmises she is still registered under her maiden name. Maybe that lack of attention in getting something as simple as a consistent professional profile in place tells us all we need to know about her nose for the details.
And although the tardy completion of the audit is the perennial black eye for the department, it is the only metric available for the serfs of the city to gauge how the lords are managing. The usefulness of the audit as a gauge of management performance and as a guide in constructing the following year’s budget is terribly compromised when it does not emerge until 2/3 of the following year has passed. How happy would these knuckleheads be if their bank or their 401(k) provider got them information 8 months after the fact? Not to mention that an error on the first day of the year being audited would now be 20 months old when it eventually came to a quasi-public view.
There is no reason, in today’s world, for the city’s managers and council not to know what daily receipts, expenditures and balances are – at the end of each workday…if the work is getting done. As a general rule, they probably don’t have such a need each day, but technologically there is no reason why a linked laptop can’t be used to answer questions of this sort during work sessions and council meetings. The “I’ll get back to you” (if it’s ever convenient) or “file a FOIA request” statements should be clearly recognized for the obstructionist subterfuges that they are.
The bulk of the work she supervises is not rocket science: send out bills and credit them to the account when the cash comes in; drop off the money at the bank; do the payroll; and manage the city’s cash. Pretty predictable and routine stuff for the most part. She has friendly enablers in the form of the mayor and administrator so that if she needed more help, she would only need to make a case for more worker bees. Instead the latest notion being floated is for two additional higher level staffers in next year’s budget: an accountant and a financial analyst.
Of course, if positions are approved for next year’s budget (starting July 2008), they will perhaps have new folks on board in early to mid fall, and they should be receiving their business cards sometime after New Year’s 2009, just before the delivery of the early portions of the 2008 audit start to leak out. SSDD!!!
Do you seriously think any of her, or your, prior employers would have permitted missing a target and project this large on a repetitive basis?
The City Administrator bears a large burden for this continued debacle. By virtue of training, certification and eons of experience he should be on the same page as the Director as regards the performance of the Internal Services Department. He should be vigilant about rooting out and rectifying the types of routine problems that have cropped up year after year in audit after audit. Were he proactive, these issues may not have risen; since he’s arguably not even dutifully reactive, they have worsened. Presumptively the Director reports to him; if so, he’s doing as miserable a job of oversight as she is.
Graciously, the Mayor has assumed personal responsibility for the mess. Pity the poor trees slaughtered to print that bilge. Its pure rope-a-dope; deflect the bad news until the next news cycle. In an Executive Office suite filled to overflow with a CPA, MBAs, and an ICMA-CM it’s abundantly clear there is too much brass and not enough foot soldiers.
This isn’t rocket science people; it’s not the rapidly changing products and market share of manufacturing or computers or retailers. It’s a monopoly that is just plodding along doing the same old stuff, and even then still can’t get it right. They’d have you believe the accounting clerks are hemming and hawing over which account your water bill should go in and which account other mundane expenditures should be drawn from.
Businesspeople know that to run their businesses they have to send out bills, account for the receipts and be prepared for the accountant during the course of the year, in addition to doing business. They understand that city officials are talking down to them and insulting their intelligence when they conjure up these worthless excuses.
Pam, freshen up your resume. Kinko’s is open 24/7. Best wishes.
Soon to follow….Louise….stay tuned.
N.B.: I haven’t been able to directly follow any of today’s events so if my critique is behind the news cycle, my apologies.
by Pseudolus Erronius
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Info Please:
What is Oland’s salary (and what about Pick’s).