March 7, 2008 | Read Time: 1 minute
A chief financial officer of a charity in San Francisco was fired this week after the organization found that he had taken $3.6-million to play the stock market.
And some observers say the board of directors of the Music Community Concourse Partnership also needs to take responsibility for the situation.
“I must ask, where’s the board and the good systems and policies? For that matter, where was the exec?” wrote Michael Burns, a Connecticut strategic-planning consultant, on Nonprofit Board Crisis. “I mean, $3.6-million lost in the stock market — just how does anyone even get to play with that much money without it being noticed? Bad governance and bad management.”
The anonymous author of the blog Don’t Tell the Donor is also taking aim at the organization’s board of directors.
“In situations like these, you have to ask how the hell the board of directors allowed this much money to be ‘borrowed’ without a proper internal control process,” she wrote.
How much responsibility do board members have to monitor the financial operations of their organizations? Did the Music Community Concourse Partnership’s board fail in its duties? Click on the comment link below this post to share your thoughts.
