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Politics & Government

Library Board Discusses Forensic Audit

An auditor spoke to the issue of a forensic audit at Thursday's board meeting.

Five new members were sworn into the board of the Morton Grove Public Library Thursday night after a spring election that swept in four of them.

The fifth, Christa Quinn, was appointed at the April board meeting over the public objection of the four trustees-elect, who ran under the party name B-PAC, an acronym of the last names of Paul Berg, Catherine Peters, Mark Albers and David Calimag.

The group ran on a platform of lower taxes and the retention of the current library building, and seemed to raise the specter of financial mismanagement with the promise of a five-year “forensic audit” of the library.

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Such an audit would probably cost in the neighborhood of $50,000, the trustees learned from Dan Berg, an auditor who annually charges about $4,000 to audit the finances of the library in conjunction with his audit of the village books each year.

No decision has yet been made about whether the board will seek a forensic audit, but acting chairman Dan Hoffman said in an interview that he thinks because of B-PAC’s rhetoric during the campaign, an additional audit is inevitable and that he feels his integrity has been questioned.

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“My friends, family and neighbors have heard that there have been financial improprieties,” he said. "They have to do it."

“Do I believe it’s a waste of money?" he added. "You betcha.”

During the auditor’s presentation, Miller asked him if he’d ever felt the need to do a forensic audit of the library and he replied “there was never been any inkling that it was required.”

“We’ve not found the need in the past to go to that extent,” Berg said.

The new chairman, Albers, said he was pleased to hear from the auditor that "the library is in good financial health."

Albers said he's not sure whether the B-PAC bloc will press forward with the forensic audit or that it will be necessary. He said he plans to look at the library's finances himself and if he finds any irregularities, will bring them to the full board. "If there's nothing to fear, there's nothing to fear," Albers said.

"It's a group decision whether we do an audit," he said, "not an individual decision."

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