False Financial Reporting - a 16 Year Tradition in CA City

[Reality Check]

http://www.officer.com/news/10742092/th ... y-finances
The accusation was fairly straight forward.

What was unusual is that it was the 17th largest cities in California with a population of over 200,000.

At the end of each year the cities financial staff prepared a budget for the next year including an estimate of the surplus or deficit carried over from the previous year.

According to the city attorney for 13 of the past 16 years the city council was given false documents indicating that the city was in surplus rather than deficit.

After the staff was replaced it was discovered the surpluses were false, that is the accusation.

The California city voted to file an emergency bankruptcy petition after the ongoing historic deficits, and the current lack of cash to pay it's bills was discovered.

This will be the second largest city bankruptcy in the United States, after the recent largest filing for a U.S. city by Stockton.

http://www.pe.com/local-news/politics/p ... s-work.ece

[Trevor]

I live in California and I can tell you that this is pretty much par for the course. I remember a few years ago when they were talking about the size of the state deficit. As it turned out, it was about double what they were reporting. None of this is new and it's meant to conceal that California is not far from bankruptcy.