Some readers have expressed interest in how much money Housing Authority of the County of DeKalb (HACD) has paid to Sundog IT over the past few years. My ballpark figure covering the calendar years 2015 through 2020 is $325,000. The rest of the post will be about why we can call it only a ballpark figure.
I requested payment listings of HACD from January 1, 2015 “to date,” which was the tail end of August. I expected they would print off a report, but that’s not what the response looks like to me. A report typically identifies the program user and has dates and page numbers. This looks like somebody made a table in Word in which payment information was copied and pasted.
housing-auth-payments-2015-2020I’ve seen this kind of thing twice before. The first time was when I served on the board of directors of a not-for-profit organization where the executive was hiding transactions from the board. The second time was in a City of DeKalb executive session during which certain administrators ran a smear campaign against one of their colleagues.
Why HACD decided not to print a report, we may never know. I’m just explaining why this is an automatic red flag to me.
Another red flag: missing information. Look on the third page of the PDF to the start of 2020; you can see no entries for February, March, or April. I have 2020 invoices on hand and in cross-checking I did find payments for March and April, and more for January, too. I’ve asked for February payments now and have no reason to believe I won’t get them.
But I have no reason to trust that the missing payments I’ve found were the only omissions, either.