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Strengthen safeguards, avoid scandal

If the Metra scandal wasn't enough to make government agencies in our region examine the safeguards that oversee how employees spend money, then the revelations coming out of a suburban waste agency should add even more incentive.

News of a financial security breach at the Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County began two weeks ago when an independent auditor discovered as much as $400,000 in “unaccounted funds” connected to a current-year budget line item for professional development.

An investigation is under way and no charges have been filed. The agency's longtime executive director, C. Brooke Beal, was first placed on paid leave and has since resigned from his $160,000-a-year job.

To no one's surprise, the missing money is leading to policy changes at SWANCC, established in 1988 to manage garbage collection for 23 Northwest suburban communities.

As reported in a series of stories by Daily Herald reporters Ashok Selvan and Madhu Krishnamurthy, SWANCC is adding a second layer of oversight to future expenses.

Its policies previously called for any expenses from that professional development line item to be approved by the chairman of the board's executive committee.

That didn't occur in this case. Now, such expenses will be reviewed by the committee chairman and the committee itself.

It follows in the footsteps of a scandal at Metra, where officials are tightening controls over the transportation agency's pension plans. Structural weaknesses in the plan were found after an auditor analyzed abuses of power under former executive director Phil Pagano, who committed suicide in May in the midst of revelations he received at least $475,000 in unauthorized vacation payments over the course of several years.

The Metra reforms that go into effect Jan. 1 will stop cases of “pension spiking,” involving inordinate salary increases or bonuses at the end of an employee's career that could result in artificially high retirement benefits. As of now, pension spiking is not illegal, and it's a pretty common practice in other parts of government. While it's not exactly the same as the corruption that's being investigated at Metra, it shows the kind of loose approach agencies sometimes take to accounting and to the compensation of top executives.

What Metra and SWANCC are trying to do through these changes is strengthen the checks and balances that should have been in place to protect against any possible hanky-panky involving taxpayer dollars.

It's too little, too late for these specific situations at SWANCC and Metra, but their problems should be enough to motivate other agencies to quickly examine policies and strengthen where necessary.