Let's assume Maurice Taggart is innocent or at least let's not assume he's guilty. He gets that benefit like anyone else would.
But let's also recognize that, according to the authorities, more than $667,000 is missing from the Pine Bluff Urban Renewal Agency coffers and that it disappeared during Taggart's former time as executive director -- and he and a high school buddy have been charged.
A little retrospective is in order.
When The Commercial broke the story a month or so ago that there was a state police investigation into missing money at the Urban Renewal Agency, the Go Forward Pine Bluff folks became apoplectic, protesting that the story wasn't news because the Urban Renewal staff had alerted authorities to the absence of funds.
If you walk into your house and find it's been ransacked and stuff is missing, calling the police doesn't change the fact that your house was ransacked and stuff is missing. Indeed, there was a state police investigation looking into missing money at the Urban Renewal Agency and now, as of Thursday, we all know there was a ton of it involved.
Go Forward, which seems to take credit for pretty days, is, not surprisingly, now distancing itself from the Urban Renewal Agency. When Urban Renewal was getting rid of blight and acquiring property right and left and looking like a juggernaut, Go Forward undoubtedly was proud to be associated with the agency. Now, though, things are a bit icky, what with the 46 counts of forgery and 38 counts of theft of property for the two men, and, oh, the one count of abuse of office -- which is Taggart's alone.
To be sure, Urban Renewal, on pretty days and rainy ones, is a subsidiary of Go Forward. If anything, Urban Renewal is one of the chief engines for progress that Go Forward has, despite the fact that Urban Renewal's record has been mostly dismal.
So let's get back to the missing money. We knew an auditor who used to say that when someone was found to have embezzled money in one of the operations he looked after, he took it as a failure on his part that he allowed a system to be in place that made it possible for someone to steal money. Such conscientiousness was apparently missing from the halls of Urban Renewal.
Auditors will also tell you over and over the importance of separating duties when it comes to money. Don't allow one person to be in charge of too many elements of money handling or you're asking for trouble. Anyone who has ever worked in an office is aware of this basic concept.
And yet, according to the affidavit from the prosecutor's office, Taggart handled all of the incoming invoices and also put them into the city's accounting system to be paid. Because his office is so small – maybe just him and an assistant – the chance of him or them overseeing too many money duties was high. The monetary risk was high as well considering the amount coming through the office was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Why was no one else watching over this process? Where was the due diligence? Why was there such a failure in protecting the public's tax dollars?
What prosecutors allegedly discovered is that the other person charged with Taggart was submitting invoices, which were getting paid, but that another company doing the actual work was also getting paid for the same jobs. That is about the simplest form of embezzlement imaginable. And no one caught it? Even when two checks were being written for the same job? It boggles the mind that those in charge of and who oversaw Urban Renewal allowed this to happen. Such a fundamental failure feeds into the notion that the agency itself should be done away with if that's the best it can do.
When the Go Forward-proposed and -sponsored sales tax renewal was being debated, we often heard members of the public say they just didn't see where the city had benefited to the tune of some $30 million in spent tax money. Well, now we know that $667,384 of it just walked off. Allegedly.