FINDING $54 MILLION.

FINDING $54 MILLION. After the Lehman bankruptcy four years ago, I posted about my astonishment at how long it took to find Lehman’s assets and speculated that the traditional accounting and auditing function of keeping track of assets and liabilities was not being done because it was not considered intellectually interesting. Since then, there have been a number of similar surprises, such as the inability to find the money that disappeared almost overnight from MF Global customer accounts. Now, it has been discovered that the California Department of Parks and Recreation has $54 million in its accounts which state officials and others did not know it had. This is the more surprising because a great deal of attention had been paid to what was claimed to be a $22 million deficit for the department—a deficit that led to threats to close 70 parks and a scramble to keep them open by alternative means. Once more it seems that the most routine of bookkeeping functions has not been carried out.