The independent auditing firm hired to pore over D.C. Public Schools will tell Mayor Adrian Fenty that city Chief Financial Officer Natwar Gandhi should relinquish control of the schools’ stricken finances, City Hall sources told The Examiner.
Alvarez & Marsal gave the schools their first top-to-bottom review. The firm is scheduled to brief new schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee today. Sources told The Examiner that Alvarez & Marsal’s top recommendation will be to give Rhee her own budget authority. The schools’ finances have been controlled by Gandhi’s office for more than a decade.
The recommendation is likely to exacerbate tensions between Fenty’s school reform team and Gandhi. Sources told The Examiner that Rhee has already asked Gandhi to replace the current school finance officer, Pamela Graham, with someone closer to Rhee. The schools are on the “high risk” list for federal funds because of sloppy controls over the spending, and Rhee has said publicly she must change the way business is done at school headquarters.
“Before I can hold people accountable,” she said, “we’ve got to do our job.”
Fenty, who has staked his political career on fixing the stricken schools, took credit for bringing in Alvarez’s audit of the school, one of the first top-to-bottom reviews of the schools’ budget ever, and will be hard-pressed to ignore the firm’s recommendations.
Neither Gandhi nor his spokeswoman responded to requests for comment. Through a decade’s worth of often scathing outside audits, Gandhi has successfully blamed the schools for the widespread waste, fraud and abuse in the system. But in the months since Fenty made public education the top public policy matter in local government, Gandhi’s plea of innocence has increasingly fallen on deaf ears around the John A. Wilson Building.
“Dr. Gandhi is a public servant, like the rest of us. There are no fiefdoms here,” said D.C. Council Member Tommy Wells, D-Ward 6. “The finance office should report to the chancellor. It’s a better system.”
