Page 17 of Not My Friend
I couldn’t decide if I was happy or freaked out by her words.
“It’s complicated. I’m in a power position over you as your auditor. I need to keep things professional and make sure there’s no hint of impropriety or anything that violates state ethics rules or we’ll both be in trouble.”
“You’re right,” she said. “And I totally agree. But let me ask you something. If we ran into each other some other way, and we were working different jobs, what conversation would we be having right now?”
“I’d be asking you if we should try to date again,” I admitted.
I was as surprised by that admission as she seemed to be.
“But since I can’t do that, I’m going to say that for now we can only be friends.”
“You’re not my friend,” she said, echoing my words from the other day. “You’re much more than that. But maybe when this is all over and your audit is complete, we can figure out whether we can truly be friends. Or something more.”
“I’d like that.”
I resisted saying that something inside me said this was our second chance. I just wasn’t sure if I was going to accept it.
Gina
“There’s a discrepancy here.”
I looked up from my laptop as Kimberly held up one of the ledgers we’d gotten from our CFO Erin.
“What do you mean?”
“The ledger says that you gave two hundred dollars of client assistance to help this client pay their electric bill,” Kimberly said. “But your case notes say that when the client asked for help with utilities, you helped them fill out an assistance application for the electric company and they were later approved.”
I frowned. “That can’t be right. Maybe Erin used the wrong client name?”
She shook her head. “This is the fourth instance I’ve found where a client file says they got assistance from another agency with rent or utilities, but your fiscal reports say that you used grant funds to pay them.”
“We rarely use grant funds for rent or utilities beyond the move-in assistance. We try to save our client assistance dollars to be last in to make them stretch farther.”
“Come look at it yourself.”
I walked around the table and watched over her shoulder as she pointed out the four examples she’d found. My stomach twinged with discomfort at what I was seeing.
“Shit, that does look weird. We need to look at all these records, don’t we?”
She nodded. “I’d rather we research them ourselves and see if we find a reason for the discrepancies before I talk to my boss.”
My heart thudded painfully in my chest. If there were financial anomalies, our entire grant could be at risk. Surely Erin wouldn’t do something shady? She’d been with the organization for twenty years. The board and my boss respected her. She’d always been supportive of me and my program. There had to be another explanation.
Four hours later I had to admit that there didn’t seem to be any other explanation. Not only had we uncovered several other bogus payments, but every one of them hadbeen transferred into the same bank account. There was no reasonable explanation why the same account would be used to pay for services that were covered by multiple utilities, let alone multiple landlords.
“What back-up do you typically get for your budget?” Kimberly asked. “Is there something in your reports that would tell you something weird was going on?”
I knew what she was asking. She wanted to know if I’d missed what was going on right under my nose. I wasn’t offended though. It was a fair question, giving the situation.
“Let me grab my files and we’ll check it out.”
I returned with the reports I received each month from Erin, a heavy feeling in my heart. This was bad. Really bad.
“I get these reports,” I told Kimberly, dropping into the chair next to her so we could look at them together. “There are line items for client assistance as well as all the other allowable expenses, but I don’t get detail information to know what contributes to the totals. I’ve always just trusted the numbers. It’s a large program with a lot of payments coming in and out.”
“That makes it easier to hide things,” she pointed out, studying my reports.
“Shit. What are we going to do?” I asked.
