Weekend Sept 2 , 2018
Alicia Padilla admitted embezzling $291,000 from Centro SA last Janiuary.
Amazingly she has yet to be arrested and charged. Centro is a city created entity to improve specific parts of down town. A former deputy city manager was in charge.
Please read the article. We study fraud cases in ACCT 5308 Ethics. There were numerous red flags such as continual late billings to the city as well as numerous errors and failures to include
adequate documentation. Finally Centro was unable to pay contractors. And City Manager Sculley and Don Frost were both on the Board.
Where was the oversight? Oversight was so lax that Padilla had her ex husband pretending to be a outside auditor assuring the board things were okay. There was no actual audit.
And Paidlla had a history of embezzlement and personal bankruptcy. This is a major internal control failure.
It seems to me that once again volunteer Board Members were not as involved as they should have been. And there should have been hard questions asked when the city reported so many errors by Padilla.
Professor Elam 
Leave a comment