Meanwhile, back at the horse ranch:
Sam Card says that CliftonLarsonAllen continued to do an audit for the city, despite guidelines that said they should not.
In an October deposition statement, Card said that he and his mother’s small Sterling accounting office, which became Dixon’s contracted auditor after 2005, did not do its own audit work. It only reviewed and signed off on audit work done by Clifton, which allowed one of the nation’s largest firms to keep its account.
Clifton denies Card’s claim.
If Card’s claim is true, a Northern Illinois University legal expert said, both firms’ licenses are in jeopardy.
Card was one of five persons who were interviewed by the city’s attorney, Devon Bruce, in connection with Dixon’s lawsuit against the firms that audited the city’s finances.
This is pretty big. Mainly because this amounts to Sam Card throwing CliftonLarsonAllen (fka Clifton Gunderson) under the bus for their alleged sloppy work, which may or may not have been his sloppy work too.
[Karl] Appelquist [of Clifton] told the Cards that Clifton’s staff would do the work papers and give them to the Cards for a review and signature, according to Card’s deposition. Card said he had not heard of any other such circumstance, where one firm would sign off on another firm’s work, in his 20 years as an accountant, yet he and his mother agreed to it. He said there is no documentation of that agreement.
Asked why Clifton would offer such a plan, Card said: “In my opinion they did not want to lose the client. … If they would have hired, say, a larger firm, the larger firm would have … could have come in and taken over some of the duties that Clifton was doing. Doing the audits. So they would … Clifton would have lost control of the audit and lost that revenue stream.”
Ummm…
