$1500 for a dictionary!!! Was it printed in gold?! That is an extravagance. Are parishoners able to ask for an acccount of where the money goes? I would think building funds might be another area where money could be embezzled.I agree. That’s why a finance council is mandated by Canon Law. The problem is that in a lot of places the finance council just gets a financial report, if they get that, and they don’t see the day to day spending. Many council members are not bookkeeping savvy and can’t read a balance sheet.
When I was working as secretary for my parish and made responsible for paying the bills, the fact that I couldn’t understand what a balance sheet was all about frustrated me to no end. I applied to the local community college for an online accounting course and stopped depending on the bookkeeper to tell me where we stood financially. I started keeping my own records and and doing my own calculations. By the time we took everything to her at the end of the month I already knew where we stood.
It’s easy for a priest to get away with overspending or even getting stuff for himself that he makes the parish pay for. When we found ourselves without a pastor for a year a priest was appointed administrator. He had a taste for the finer things and one day I found myself in the position of having to reimburse him for a complete edition of the Oxford dictionary – over $1500. He’d charged it to his credit card and was making the three parishes he was responsible for pay $500+ each for it.
I asked him what possible need we could have for such an expensive item and he claimed that it was vital because we had priests coming to the parishes for whom English was a second language. That made me see red. Lots of people have Masters degrees in English without ever having had their hands on the Complete Oxford. I learned English as a second language with nothing more than the Merriam-Webster on my desk. I let him know how angry I was at the extravagance without being rude. He was angry at being challenged and standing up for my parish only got me threatened as in “Be careful, I can get angry too.” He still got the bill paid by the three parishes. It showed up as office supplies and nobody would have really questioned it in an income statement.
The Complete Oxford is a 20-volume set.$1500 for a dictionary!!! Was it printed in gold?! That is an extravagance. Are parishoners able to ask for an acccount of where the money goes? I would think building funds might be another area where money could be embezzled.
20 volumes! that must be very detailed! I can’t imagine why he would need a 20 volume English language dictionary.The Complete Oxford is a 20-volume set.
Any parishioner can ask to see the expenses at any time. Most don’t even bother to read the annual report, or if they do they never question it. They generally get an income statement which lists all the income and expenses. Not once in the 11 years I was the secretary did anyone question anything on that annual report.
We’ve always listed the amounts taken in by the collection in the bulletin every week but we’ve now started to put both the amount collected and the amount spent for the month. It should be said that in the summer we usually don’t break even, regular expenses being about $1000 more than the collections in June, July and August. We want them to realize that.