NCCU review not getting to right desks
By Gregory Phillips : The Herald-Sun, Nov 23, 2006
DURHAM -- If any agencies decide to press criminal charges against the nine N.C. Central University employees found working with fake Social Security numbers, the suspects will have had plenty of time to disappear. This week, law enforcement still hadn't received the audit published last month that uncovered what was going on.
The review found nine NCCU employees who used fraudulent Social Security numbers -- seven that had never been issued and two that belonged to dead people. The five workers the auditors managed to find admitted they'd bought their cards illegally. The report, issued by state Auditor Les Merritt's office in October, stated the findings would be sent to Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong, state Attorney General Roy Cooper and U.S. Attorney Anna Mills Wagoner to determine which prosecutor, if any, should investigate.
Wagoner said Monday the report hadn't crossed her desk.
"If it went to me, I didn't get it," she said.
Follow-up enquiries with the auditor's office revealed it hadn't been sent. Chris Mears, Merritt's director of public affairs, said the mistake was discovered Monday after The Herald-Sun asked about it.
The failure occurred because the audit that uncovered the problems at NCCU was a new kind of review, according to Mears. He said that led to some administrative confusion as to whether it should be sent to law enforcement.
Most audits the office conducts are either information system reviews, which Mears called "performance checks on the way information is handled," or investigative reviews, which are usually spawned by specific complaints about state agencies from the public. The results of the first kind of review rarely uncover illegalities and aren't sent to law enforcement, while those from investigative reviews usually are, he said.
The NCCU report resulted from a new strategic review. Auditors used computerized "data mining" of the state payroll system to find employees with Social Security numbers that hadn't been issued or belonged to dead people.
"We just followed the trail to N.C. Central," Mears said. -cut-
http://www.heraldsun.com/durham/4-791955.html
* Follow the trail . . .
CMicheals at TL Nov.22, 2006: -excerpts-
No less than the Durham NAACP just had Duke Pres. Dick Brodhead keynote their Freedom Fund Banquet last Saturday. Clearly it wasn't done in an effort to divide, but unite the African-American and white communities in a time of stress.
In my story hitting stands today I quote Brodhead as saying:
"...it seems to me that everyone who is a party to this issue, in this community or elsewhere, has got to understand that our collective community faith requires us to stand together for truth and justice, even in the face of difficult situations, and emotions.”
“The world of due process and the world of justice based on evidence is a world we all need,” the Duke president continued. “We need the benefit of presumption of innocence. We need the benefit of waiting until the facts are in before judgment is rendered. We all need that, though I must say, people who have not had the whole benefit of the law know that they have as much or more to lose than anybody from the opposite world, a world where prejudice is allowed to make decisions.”
“A world in which you can decide whether someone’s guilty by deciding what category of humanity they belong to, or a world in which people feel free to reach conclusions without taking the trouble to establish the facts.”
“That is a dangerous world to live in,” Brodhead declared. “That’s not dangerous for some people; that’s dangerous for all people, and that itself is one of the lessons of the civil rights movement.”
Now this may come as a shock to you, and you'll have to read the whole exclusive story (I was the only working reporter there) to see it in context, but Brodhead was pushing hard to a predominately Black audience during his remarks for the Duke Three to be presumed innocent until proven otherwise in court.
http://forums.talkleft.com/index.php/topic,784.0.html
[For the record]- An official transcript of this speech might be a good thing.