District of Columbia Chief Financial Officer Natwar Gandhi leapt to the defense of his agency after weeks of criticism that his employees aren’t doing enough to fight corruption and waste in the city’s failing school system.
In an e-mail to The Examiner sent through his spokeswoman, Maryann Young, Gandhi said his agency lacks the legal authority to take on the fraud, waste and abuse that have plagued the city’s schools.
“We do not have complete financial oversight in schools or in other District government agencies,” Gandhi wrote. “And this is a common misunderstanding.”
But Gandhi said “five years of balanced budgets and clean opinions from independent auditors” are an answer to his critics.
Gandhi’s office was created by Congress after the District’s finances went into a tailspin in the mid-1990s. Hundreds of finance office employees are dispatched throughout the city’s agencies, charged with managing billions in federal and local funds.
The two-tiered arrangement, where employees from one agency control the money while employees from another agency try to put it to use, has caused the most conflict in the city’s $1.3 billion schools.
Schools Superintendent Clifford B. Janey has clashed with Gandhi’s office over budget autonomy.
Janey is not the only one: In the last 10 years, there have been 10 different chief finance officer in the public schools. And some in the city say that Rudolph Crew — the leading candidate to become D.C. schools superintendent in 2004 — withdrew from consideration because he wanted control over the schools’ purse strings.
Some critics, such as Mary Levy, staff attorney for the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, say that the sensitivities over budget autonomy have made Gandhi too accommodating to school executives.
Levy said corruption and waste have flourished in the city’s schools in part because “responsibility is opaque.”
“We have no way of knowing whether school officials are failing to provide supervision and documentation of expenditures or whether the CFO has not instituted effective systems and internal controls,” Young said. “When we ask, one side directs us to the other.”
Gandhi was criticized earlier this year when it emerged that his office approved payments to a host of questionable charter school contractors more than a month after a whistle-blower alleged that charter school executive Brenda Belton was using the contractors to line her own pockets.
Gandhi would not comment on the Belton investigation. But he said that “anyone who is accused of willfully stealing public funds needs to be held responsible under the most powerful tool available to us, the due process of law.”
