Delaware State News reports on the Chip Flowers’ travel document dump, and we find that that the State Treasurer still can’t quite wrap his mind around the escalating mismanagement of these credit card issues. For one (and the most jawdropping to me), we find that Flowers wants us to know that he lost all of those receipts because the corporate world he came from has differing standards:
Not keeping the original receipts was a mistake that Mr. Flowers acknowledged, and he attributed the discarded receipts to following the general policies of corporate business during his transition to public office in 2011.
Every corporation sets its own standard for documenting expenses, but the vast majority of them require you to actually document those expenses. The reasons are wrapped up in ensuring some budget discipline and in being able to provide an adequate audit trail, not just for the payment and receipt of funds, but also for tax purposes and being able to justify expenses being written off. There are no organizations that I have worked at that would not have had serious issues with my not being able to produce a receipt for $800+ to rent a car. On the other hand, many corporations (mine too) have gone to a completely online credit card reconciliation process — with provisions to code expenses to projects or to overhead and all paper receipts are scanned and submitted as pdfs attached to the reconciliation. Other firms are using other online services to have employees justify expenses — but it is the rare firm that won’t require the receipts. However, if you are in the IRS and reading this, it seems reasonable to assume that the Flowers Law Firm is going to be a target-rich environment for you.
Flowers claims that more than $80K has been spent in responding to this FOIA. I can’t help but think that if he had owned the original problems discovered with Benner’s credit card rather than blame the Department of Finance, all of this would have gone away.
A few weeks ago, Flowers claimed (during a call in to WDEL with Al Mascitti and El Som — at least I think El Som was there) that he was not allowed by law to say who he was meeting with re: state investments. I couldn’t find this law, and reached out to a few others who couldn’t find this law, either. But now the story about why he can’t say who he met with goes like this:
Mr. Flowers will not divulge the names of the bankers or lawyers, standing by his office’s policy for meetings with such institutions to be kept confidential.
“As a matter of policy, the Treasury rarely discusses meetings and matters relating to state portfolio,” Mr. Flowers said Friday via email.
“Additionally, if a financial institution requests a confidential meeting, we honor that request to ensure that the Treasury obtains information that may be critical to the management of the portfolio …”
Now it’s a “matter of policy”. Really? But the State Auditor is finally rousing himself:
State auditor Tom Wagner, who has begun a preliminary review of Treasury’s travel documents released to the public after a Wednesday press conference, said he “can’t fathom” why participants’ identities would be made secret when short-term investments and cash for the state are involved.
Mr. Wagner pointed to the relatively simply nature of Treasury’s investments, and the state strategies being made public through policies set by the Delaware Cash Management Policy Board as making Treasury discussions non-sensitive to identifications of parties involved.
The Division of Accounting says they’ll be reviewing the records that were released last week, yet we still have Chip contradicting himself, after telling the NJ that some of his travel records were missing:
On Friday, Mr. Flowers said the Division of Accounting had possessed the information for months.
LOL! But I’ll leave you with the best quote of the story:
“It was amazing looking out at a bank of cameras and it kind of felt like a White House press conference,” Mr. Flowers said. “I was slightly nervous; I wondered how does something so small get so big? And how do I get it back to reality?
This is so choice in so many ways — not just in imagining himself in a White House press conference, but in the sheer cluelessness on how he got to be facing all of those cameras in the first place and his own hand in routinely shifting the reality (whatever that might be) of this situation.
And I’m apologizing in advance for not offering you guys pancakes with this story.