whatever the hell that means…
One of our hospital’s corporate directors has just “resigned”. She is two levels directly above me, in other words my boss’s boss. That puts her fairly high up – in a staff of 3500, there’s about 40 at her level and only a dozen or so veeps and the CEO higher on the chart. By those of us below her it was universally understood she was a terrible manager and had some real psychological issues (to put it VERY kindly). But now we’ve learned she was also a thief, and I wonder how much of the first two items were real and how much they were a cover for her thievery.
We don’t know yet exactly how much she took, or all the means, or for how long she stole, and we may never know, but I’ll get back to that later. But one method we were told about directly involves me personally. I’m a media technician and I work on just about every corporate public event setting up sound or video or both. Before they hired me 3 years ago, they brought in a “consultant” technician, for those kind of events. By and large they used… her husband, who thay paid $150/hour to set them up. I worked with the guy on a couple of events on my first few months on the job, and he is actually a quite competent, capable guy. There’s no question he can actually perform the work he was hired for. Nevertheless, it became clear very quickly afyer I was hired that I could handle their technical needs. Even in the early gigs where they brought him in, he had nothing to do.
Actually, I wrote a thread about it two years ago. Someone suggested even in that thread there might be embezzlement involved. Two years ago I was saying we had no need to bring him in for events, and in all the intervening time we’ve never called him back. But it turns out we’ve been paying him (or her, it’s unclear) as if he’s been working all these events at $150/hour. She’s been authorizing payments to her husband for every major hospital event, ever since I started, actually even before I started, and the payments never stopped though the work did.
As I said before, we don’t know the dimensions of her crime and we may never, because the company is going to let her walk. I’m not sure why – embarassment is certainly a factor, and I don’t think a lot of our acounting practices can stand public scrutiny. She could get away with shit like this because she wouldn’t let her managers control their own budgets. You couln’t just put in a PO to make a major purchase, you had to tell her what you wanted, and something kind of similar might or might not show up some day. And she controlled the expenditures of 6 departments, and at the end of the year in the final accounting reports we could see that she routinely spent one department’s money for another department’s equipment, and no one ever came down on her for completely ignoring standard financial practices. We all knew she operated this way LONG before it was understood she was stealing. We thought she was a control freak and somewhat paranoid, with a dash of ADD. In retrospect, we SHOULD have thought theft, because that’s the kind of stuff thieves do to cover for themselves.
I am really pissed that they’ve decided not to conest her leaving, and don’t call the cops. But I have mixed feelings, as her paper trail indirectly points to my incompetence as the justification for the continued necessary services of her consultant husband, and I suspect that I would be a witness in any criminal trial, which would not be a happy thing.
Still, a few years ago the hospital found a low level secretary embezzling a few grand, called in the law, and announced in a company-wide email that as an ethics-based institution we were obliged to pursue the wrong doer with every legal means. And most people here buy into that – I think I was the only one in the department NOT shocked that she is walking away free and clear.
Frankly if news of this disproportionate treatment gets out, and I can’t imagine it won’t, it will do more damage to the institution than the theft would. People LOVE to work here. I LOVE to work here, about 90% of the time. But I have been getting the sense that we, unfortunately like much of America, are buying appearance over substance. That is a very depressing thing, and if there is one place it must be resisted it’s in the medical industry.
Anyway, I am one discombobulated guy tonight.
Whatever the hell that means.
