The Stake Auditor and I met this evening to go over the 9th Ward’s financial books. It’s a semi-annual audit, which means I can look forward to another one in February.

Anyway, we did the books, and it was pretty dull. No big discrepancies, a few minor points of “you’re not doing this right,” and a couple of items that our Bishop needs to review. The worst part: it took just over 150 minutes. The best part: the auditor was pretty impressed with how meticulous I was in my record-keeping. Oh, and the bits where there were discrepancies were bits that happened BEFORE I came on board. So far they have nothing they can pin on me.

There was this small matter of $50 in cash that went AWOL during the first donation batch in April. In preparation for the audit, I spent an hour reviewing donation envelopes last Sunday trying to figure out what happened. The bank counted the cash we sent them, and said we were $50 short compared to what we said we’d deposited. Naturally, I had to go through all of that batch’s reciepts (LDS donations have little receipts that go with them, and we save every one of ’em). This evening I told the auditor about the process, showed him my notes, and explained why I couldn’t find the money. According to the receipts, we collected what we told the bank we were depositing. Therefore, we either 1) miscounted the same stack of cash in the same way during two separate countings ($50 over, with one or more cash donations being under what the reciepts said) , 2) somebody stole $50 after we counted but before we filled the deposit bag, or 3) Bank Error.

I’m really glad that particular batch wasn’t MY batch. I didn’t come on board until June. Occam’s razor says “explanation 2.” But I found one cash donation receipt that could have had several $50 bills in it, and that ended in *80. That could have been transposed into *30 pretty easily with careless counting (and it would have to happen three times — once by the donor, once by the clerk, and once by the guy re-counting), and with THAT explanation in hand, I still trust the guys who did that batch.

I just don’t trust ’em to count MY money.

So… the auditor liked my work, and I don’t stand accused of perfidy, nor do I have to accuse anyone else of it. And I’m going to ride roughshod over ANYBODY who tries to mess with my system of stapling some of these little pieces of paper to other little pieces of paper, now that I know how important they are during an audit. If I have to become a petty bureaucrat, I plan to be an EFFICIENT one.

–Howard