THAR'S GOLD IN THEM THAR BILLS Well, you betcha. If’n you’re a-making the bills up for a company you own and also a-paying them for the school district of which you are treasurer. It’ s called self-enrichment and it’s practiced extensively out here on Long Island, where I live surrounded by thieves. There are also other ways to reach the goal. If you have a roommate with whom you you’re on good terms he can become a “company” and bill you for his services, making it possible to deliver his check to him without ever leaving home. Or you can take a legitimate company and pay them in a normal way, but make a book entry for a much larger amount than you actually sent. This can be covered by a second check making up the difference between the ledger entry and the first check, but payable to yourself or a proxy. As long as no one examines the checks -- and no one did -- the books will balance and everyone will be happy. These are all ways employed in the Roslyn school district to siphon off money that apparently wasn’t really needed for education, since the district continued to send 95% of its graduates on to college. Other uses were found for it, though, such as mansions and cars for the treasurer and luxury travel and even dry cleaning for the school superintendent, according to newspaper reports. Similar situations are beginning to turn up in other school districts now that the alarm has been sounded and audits are getting underway. One of these situations has been found in the William Floyd school district in Suffolk County on the east end of the Island. Two hundred and twenty-eight years after he signed the Declaration of Independence Floyd’s name has finally become known to his countrymen. I think he’d prefer to be forgotten. Every day literally brings new revelations of ingenious ways to beat the system. Family ties are useful. The lady who has been arrested on suspicion she stole $8 million from the Roslyn district while serving as chief financial officer had a niece working as a clerk in the school office. It is now alleged that the niece got an extra stipend from the district for booking all out-of-town trips made by its personnel and double-dipped on this by making a deal with a local travel agency to get a commission on each trip she booked through them. A rakeoff, in other words. She gave them an exclusive on the school business, although book entries show amounts also paid out to other agencies. They deny ever receiving any such payments. The trips themselves, which were generally taken by the superintendent of schools and some particular friends, have come under scrutiny because, while they usually involved travel to places like Las Vegas for “seminars”, there seems to be no proof the pilgrims actually attended them. Then what did they do in Las Vegas? Roslyn awaits an answer. As well as showing phony overpayments to actual vendors, Roslyn’s books show lots of payments to alleged vendors, who deny any connection at all with the school and say they never were paid for anything. The objective of this is pretty clear. When it comes to purchasing supplies for one’s employer it’s always better to show a range of vendors to deter any suspicions of favoritism. I operated this way in my bank job. The difference between me and Roslyn is that the vendors delivered the goods and I made the payments. It’s better that way. The travel racketeering bothers me also. I worked in a private business paying taxes to the government. We were so hard-pressed for money that all the proposals for seminars, meetings, workshops and the rest that flowed into my office every day had to be rejected. Some of them might even have been useful. It’s galling to see that a clutch of drones living off money paid in by us and other taxpayers were able to treat themselves to a succession of junkets where they didn’t even bother to attend the meetings that provided the pretext for their joyrides. Ma foi, but this is how the Revolution came about. The common denominator is compulsion. The peasants were compelled to pay taxes which the nobility spent on their pleasures. Substitute “taxpayers” for “peasants" and you have the current situation. The payments aren’t voluntary, such as those that enrich rock stars, but legally required with no evasion permitted. Does the guillotine loom? The William Floyd district is the Auvergne of Long Island, which is to say it’ s relatively poor and in this way similar to the French country districts where the peasants eventually burnt down the castles of the aristocracy. The Floyd educational aristocracy feathered its nest not through phony payments made to non-existent vendors, but by direct ones made to themselves, thereby eliminating the middleman. The district treasurer made out two completely unearned checks to James A. Wright, one for $166,500 and the other for $186,500. James A. Wright was himself. These amounts had the effect of increasing his base pay for his last five years of work to an amount sufficient to increase his pension by an extra $110,000 yearly. The pension was calculated as a percentage of base pay. He began to collect an amount slightly less than $200,000 a year, giving him every reason to look forward to a happy retirement. Talk about golden years, well… This idyll has now been interrupted by an investigation that has revealed these shenanigans and similar ones that benefited another William Floyd retiree, a Mr. Cifonelli, who retired in 1998 with a hardship amount of only $133,000 yearly. This wasn’t enough to sustain a Long Island educator-type lifestyle, so he eked it out with consultant fees from the district totaling more than $760,000 from 1999 to May of this year. He has since been relieved of his consultant duties, but he’s still collecting his exorbitant pension.. The Floyd folks seem to have carved out their own niche in education, but there are links between them and Roslyn, even though the two districts are fifty miles apart, in different counties, and in very different income brackets. The major link is Mrs. Gluckin, the Roslyn chief financial officer, whose niece in addition to the travel billing I’ve described, was also instrumental in ordering $280,000 worth of computers, monitors, games, movies and other items which were delivered to other members of the family, but also to Mr. Tassone, the superintendent of schools. Mr. Tassone was Gluckin’s patron when she arrived from, where else, William Floyd., where she had been a school bus driver. He also took on board a Mr. Galinski, formerly chairman of the Floyd school board, whom he made superintendent of buildings, and who went with him on his school-sponsored excursions to Las Vegas and Atlantic City. The best is yet to come. Mrs. Gluckin is suspected of misappropriating $8 million. For a clue to how she could have done it, well, a publisher in Oklahoma who is down on the Roslyn books for $737,000 in payments, says he never even did business with Roslyn. Stand by for more revelations from swinging Long Island. You can read about them as they happen in Newsday.
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