Posted on 10/13/2011 2:12:59 PM PDT by 1010RD
Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle fired Comptroller Constance Kravitz, whose office was responsible for a $90 million overstatement of tax revenues.
Kravitz, tapped by former County Board President Todd Stroger in September 2009, earned $165,000 annually. She was let go Wednesday.
In June, Preckwinkle announced that her staff was preparing financial reports for a routine audit of the 2010 fiscal year when they caught a discrepancy. When they dug deeper and examined reports for the previous year, they found duplicate journal entries for the sales tax revenue — $66 million — as well as the cigarette tax — $24 million.
One of Kravitz’s subordinates initially wore the jacket for double-booking the revenues and was fired. Now she’s gone.
“We had the $90 million misstatement on her watch,” Preckwinkle’s chief of staff Kurt Summers said, when asked about her dismissal. “But it was just time for us to go in a different direction.”
As comptroller, Kravitz was in charge of paying the county’s bills, from taking care of county payroll to cutting checks to vendors, and serving as the official recordkeeper of the county’s spending and revenues.
In recent weeks, Kravitz was publicly criticized during a County Board meeting over an error-riddled report her office released detailing which county employees had and hadn’t taken furlough days this year. Preckwinkle told her to redo the report and later referred publicly to the errors as “embarrassing.”
Reached Wednesday night, Kravitz said: “I wish them the best, and good luck to the person who replaces me, but I put my heart and soul in to that place.”
But this is typical Cook County government. She's firing Todd's hack. This just gives you a small taste of who's running our government. Preckwinkle is better than Stroger, but she's a flaming liberal.
I posted this for the last line from the now fired Comptroller:
“I wish them the best, and good luck to the person who replaces me, but I put my heart and soul in to that place.”
A black heart and empty soul perfectly describes Cook County government.
More background on the Cook County Democrat scene.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/21/080721fa_fact_lizza
It’s the New Yorker, but a good and fairly accurate article nonetheless.
She was able to steal enough?
I would work long and hard to get my name changed if I were born a Preckwinkle.
I mean come on. Preckwinkle? Please.
Reached Wednesday night, Kravitz said: “I wish them the best, and good luck to the person who replaces me, but I put my heart and soul in to that place.”Things might have worked out better if you had put your brain into it as well.
“I mean come on. Preckwinkle? Please.”
Hey! Preckwinkle is my middle name!
It was changed, originally it was Wrinklepreck.
Dr. Bogus Preckwinkle Pachysandra has a certain regality to it, I must admit.
It works locally and means ‘not a very corrupt or dangerous liberal’ or something close to that.
You are right though! Preckwinkle as a surname sucks!
Government revenue overstated, how shocking.
So now its not just politicians who paint a rosy picture of revenue. Now its government treasurers too.
So these are cold hard facts: government never makes as much as it thinks it will, and expenditures are never as low as they state. If this was the private sector, such as a publicly traded company, someone would have gone to jail for defrauding investors.
But when government accounts defraud muni bond investors by hiding or obfuscating the true nature of the financial books, we call that politics. Outrageous.
Married Zeus Preckwinkle
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