city ethics commissioner and Loyola Law School professor, said the level of financial mismanagement in Compton does not rise to the level of Bell, a small Southern California city that became a poster child for graft after city leaders were caught paying themselves outsized salaries. It was the tardiness of financial reports that triggered the state audit.
For three years, the city did not compare its bookkeeping records with those of its bank, “an effective tool to detect mistakes, errors and embezzlement.” And Compton officials frequently missed financial report deadlines, leaving one accounting document past due by 35 months, the audit found. The city failed to conduct meaningful oversight, allowing, in one instance, a single employee to count cash, prepare daily deposit slips and perform end-of-day reconciliations - duties that should be conducted by different people to prevent theft, the report found. The charges also include $1,975 in for unspecified supplies and $1,274 for a camera. Some of those charges include unexplained trips to Connecticut, Miami, New York, Las Vegas, and Washington, D.C. The report found that $51,695 in expenses charged to city-issued credit cards were questionable because officials did not provide required documentation and justification for the purchases.
City officials overspent on events and failed to send public works projects out for bids. The state review, which examined city finances from July 1, 2013, through June 30, 2016, found that Compton has a budget 300% higher than the average budget of cities of similar size and population. Still, officials upped their pay with monthly car and phone allowances, as well as other unspecified payments, which increased their total compensation to more than the amount allowed by the city charter, according to the audit. That action brought total salaries of the four council members and the mayor from an annual average of $207,000 to about $26,500, according to the audit. For years, they had boosted their salaries by paying themselves for sitting on boards and commissions - a long-standing practice the district attorney’s office said was illegal. The employee, Salvador Galvan, was sentenced in November to six and a half years in federal prison for embezzling $3.72 million from 2010 to 2016.Īmong the reforms was a move two years ago to ensure the salaries of council members and the mayor do not exceed $600 a month, as mandated by the city charter. In a response to the audit, City Manager Cecil Rhambo offered a list of new safeguards implemented after a deputy city treasurer was arrested on suspicion of stealing money from the treasurer’s office last year.
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“Compton is on a firm and definitive path to recovery, which includes a new solid source of annual tax revenue, new economic development, new fiscal policies, stable senior management and full city council support - which all occurred under my administration,” she said. Though the audit did not single out any officials by name, its publication - just days after Brown announced her ambition to run for Congress - suggests Compton’s problems are not entirely behind the city.īrown said in a statement that fixing nearly three decades of problems “is a process that requires stable leadership, new policies, adequate organizational capacity and time.” Current Mayor Aja Brown took office in 2013 on a good governance platform and vowed to bring financial stability to a municipality that had run through city managers. Fiscal mismanagement is not a new problem in Compton, where former Mayor Omar Bradley was convicted last year of misappropriating public funds.
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