State auditor closes Southside neighborhod housing services

Once again the state auditor has closed a South Minneapolis organization because they made "improper" payments.

Most readers remember a few years ago when the state auditor closed down People of Phillips for petty mistakes in bookkeeping and unauthorized expenditures. At that time we argued the City and State should have been helping the organization with their bookkeeping rather than giving them just enough rope to hang themselves.

In Shakespeare's “Hamlet,” Polonius tells Hamlet he'll pay the players what they're worth. Hamlet replies if you do that, if all of us were paid only what we're worth, how would any of us escape judgement?

Shakespeare understood. None of us could survive an audit. All our petty crimes would add up to destroy us.

What great crimes did Southside Neighborhood Housing Services commit? "Loans totaling $39,210 under a Central Neighborhood program should not have been issued due to the poor credit history of the recipients (2001-2002)."

I thought that was their job—to be the lender of last resort for people wanting to buy and rehab homes in the Central neighborhood.

"Payments totaling $3,712 were paid directly to the recipient based on typed pages labeled 'Receipt and Invoices,' with no signatures or dates by the parties performing the work (2002)." Big deal! Did the work get done? Did it look like it was worth $3,712?

There is more, but most of it seems innocent. No one tried to steal money from the organization. No one deliberately tried to defraud the public.

There were honest mistakes made in bookkeeping, and they were naïve about records. But the state auditor wanted to close them down, so an institution that was genuinely trying to help poor people buy and rehab homes was shut down.
It seems a shame!