Clallam County's Books Are So Tangled the Schools Can't Tell What They Have
A Seattle accountant has been hired to untangle ex-Treasurer Clump's records in Port Angeles — and the school districts are footing the bill themselves while an injunction threatens to stop them.
Port Angeles, May 22. — Special — Douglas Young, of Seattle, and his assistant, are engaged in experting the books kept by ex-County Treasurer Clump, and, although an injunction preventing the school directors from paying the experts is threatened, it is reported that the examination of the books will continue even if the sum required for the work has to be raised by private subscription. Owing to the bad state in which the books were left by Clump, County Treasurer Dorsey has been unable to give the various school districts in the county any satisfaction as to their financial standing, and consequently they have each contributed their proportion of the expense of experting the accounts.
“Owing to the bad state in which the books were left by Clump, County Treasurer Dorsey has been unable to give the various school districts in the county any satisfaction as to their financial standing.”
A county's books left in such disarray that school districts could not learn whether they had money at all — and the districts responded by pooling their own funds to hire an outside auditor from Seattle. The pattern is familiar: when public accounts fail, the people downstream of them (here, the schools) pay twice, once in missing money and again in the cost of finding out. Clallam County's 1895 audit quarrel is the ancestor of every modern municipal forensic audit and every school district that has had to sue to see its own ledger.
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