The High School's Secret Salary Scheme
A Seattle school board trustee was caught in a tangled web of pay-roll falsification, revealing a bizarre scheme involving a military instructor and a city official's confusion over government pay.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
A serious quarrel between members of the board of school trustees of this city has been under investigation by District Commissioner West for several days. Charges of no less than 'falsification of teachers' pay rolls and diversion of public money into illegitimate channels' were among the items of the indictment by one of the trustees against another; though there appears to have been no intimation in any quarter that the personal gain of the trustees was among the motives for any alleged irregularities. General West, who was not authorized to sit in judgment on the matters involved, but merely to take testimony in the case, brought the inquiry to an end today. The last development was one which seemed to touch the records of the District Commission themselves. Captain Borrows, of one of the local militia companies (an employee at the War Department), was called as a witness and testified that he had received pay at the rate of $50 per month as military instructor of the High School boys, having received the money from the hands of one of the High School principals who held the rank of major in the pupils' battalion. Capt. Borrows understood that his name was upon the pay-rolls the first month as that of an instructor, but upon inquiry this was found to be impossible under the law, which forbids the payment of two governmental salaries to one person. The testimony was to the effect that the High School board had decided that when a person was employed to do certain work, and the work was done, the money should be paid, and the board would manage the disbursement of its money.
“The board had decided that when a person was employed to do certain work, and the work was done, the money should be paid, and the board would manage the disbursement of its money.”
This 1885 investigation into creative accounting and salary distribution channels echoes modern Seattle's ongoing struggle with institutional transparency and the often-convoluted administrative budgets of civic departments. While the scale of the corruption here was debated, the tension between government regulations and 'getting the work done' remains a permanent feature of local bureaucracy.
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