I’ve previously written about the breakdown in Grace Church’s internal financial controls during Bob Malm’s watch. These breakdowns include:
- Overpaying one employee for many months, allegedly due to an accounting error.
- Thousands of dollars of cash and stale checks found in the church office following the resignation of a previous church administrator.
- Facially inaccurate financial reports.
- Failure to provide the vestry with school financial reports as required by law and written church policy.
- Failure to follow written church policy on the issuance of credit cards, with rector Bob Malm allegedly carrying a card in violation of church policy.
- Failure to follow canonical requirements for a finance manual. (As the longest reigning rector at Grace Church, Bob Malm surely has had ample time to make that happen.)
- The expenditures now under way for the HVAC project.
- Reduced transparency by the church following Bob’s decision to stop publicly releasing vestry minutes. (BTW, if Bob’s goal was to keep me from seeing those, he failed miserably. I see them on a regular basis.)