'Attempt at payback deal over missing COB $12,000' | The Tribune

ATTEMPTS were made to broker a deal with a College of the Bahamas employee to pay back $12,000 that disappeared from the college, The Tribune understands.#However, the funds were not recovered despite efforts by officials to resolve the problem internally because the employee refused to reimburse the College, insiders told this newspaper.#While both the student union and the employee union have made several calls for answers, sources at COB question how such a large sum of money could have “just gone missing.”via 'Attempt at payback deal over missing COB $12,000' | The Tribune.

The fundamental issue here, as far as I'm concerned, is the excessive centralization of administrative activities at the college, and the concomitant lack of transparency of these activities. Theft happens everywhere, but when all funds are held centrally without oversight or accountability, it becomes untethered money, money that seems to have no real purpose (or money whose dispensation is at the mercy of a handful of people who have limited connection to the primary work of the institution). That kind of situation tends to invite dishonesty.I'm glad the theft was discovered. I trust that the result of that discovery is far more than a forensic audit. I anticipate a solution of the sort that obtains in almost every other tertiary level institution beyond the postcolonial world: the decentralization of authority and the ability of individual departments to disburse funds without going through a single, central office one or two steps removed from the work we need to do.