EOB fails on policy for credit cards

By Timothy Pratt (contact)

Friday, Sept. 3, 2004 | 11:01 a.m.

For the second month in a row the financially troubled Economic Opportunity Board failed to come up with a policy to monitor credit card use and did not present a financial report at a board meeting.

The lack of a complete report on finances for the publicly funded organization, which last year had a budget approaching $60 million, marked the fifth consecutive month the board failed to take up the issue.

Both the credit card policy and the report were promised in the July 28 board meeting by the new management team brought in earlier that month after two federal and one state-ordered reviews earlier this year identified a host of financial, management and program problems at the Las Vegas Valley's largest nonprofit organization.

In that meeting Mary Twitty, the EOB's interim director, told the board one of her first orders of business was a review of its credit card policy, and she promised to have a new policy ready for the Aug. 30 meeting, as well as a completed investigation into previous use of the cards.

But Twitty said Thursday that she and interim deputy director Dan Miller had "bigger things to deal with" than the organization's 23 credit cards.

That included responding to all of the findings from the reviews, including one by the federal department of Housing and Urban Development and another by the Head Start bureau.

Twitty told the Sun on Thursday that the use of cards was under control, even without a written policy, since she and Miller were brought in on a contract that runs from July 7 through Nov. 26.

The cards had been placed under the control of fiscal officers even before she was hired, Twitty said, and the partial investigation of their use until now had produced no signs of wrongdoing.

But the cards were the subject of a complaint former EOB board member Chester Richardson made earlier this year to the federal Health and Human Services Department, the source of about $28 million in funds to the organization.

The EOB was founded in 1964 to fight poverty and mostly works with federal funds.

The complaint said there were "over 25 credit cards being used by staff that are paid by federal funds. However, not one Board member has ever seen a credit card bill."

The lack of control over credit cards was then mentioned in subsequent reviews of the organization. However, an exhaustive review of credit card bills over a period of time appeared to be lacking in all of the reviews, and Twitty has also not achieved that task.

As for the policy on the issue, Twitty said Thursday that "by Nov. 30 ... policies ... (will) all be written."

The contract with Twitty and Miller, who work for a group called the Peer to Peer Crisis Intervention team from Mid-Iowa Community Action Inc., is to expire by the end of November.

The state brought in the Mid-Iowa team with about $225,000 in federal money. Its purpose is to respond to the two federal reviews and the state-ordered, federally funded review, all of which were done this spring.

But so far the team hasn't presented an updated financial report on the organization, since a financial report Miller had prepared for the Aug. 30 board meeting was tabled.

Twitty said board chairman Claude Logan asked to table the report because it "didn't have final, permanent numbers."

"Logan said he didn't want to put out to the public preliminary numbers," she said.

The organization's interim director said that questions about finances and the use of the cards were "sensationalistic" and that her group's work was proceeding apace.

"Our practices are in order," she said.