Release of USCF Financial Statements has been Delayed
Sam Sloan
another six days before the final deadline. The election will be
close. Just one vote may decide the election.
Some candidates favor maintaining the status quo. Some, including me,
demand change. (The real views of most candidates are unknown).
There are three status-quo guys who will be continuing as board
members regardless of the results of the election, so all they have to
have is one more status quo person be elected and they will have a
lock on the USCF for the next two years.
In the recent history of the USCF there has been a tremendous
difference between what the office reported and what the auditors
finally reported. One year, the office reported a $300,000 surplus but
after the elections the auditors reported a $300,000 deficit.
Right now, the status quo gang is claiming a minimal profit or loss.
However, they refuse to release the actual figures now.
Obviously, we have to assume the worst, that the release of the final
figures will hurt the candidates they are backing and therefore they
are stonewalling and will not release the financial figures until
after the election has been decided.
Sam Sloan
Sam Sloan
Sam Sloan
summer before scholastic membership renewals begin and after the
spring nationals.[/quote]
They already changed the fiscal year once for similar reasons. The
fiscal year used to end on June 30. They changed it to May 31 so that
the results would be out in time for the election.
As a result, one fiscal year was only 11 months long.
Now the situation is that the group in power can manipulate the date
of the release of the results in such as way as will favor them.
Presumably, if the results are good they will release them early, if
bad they will release them late.
It is obvious that they now have the results. They are stonewalling
and delaying the release of the financial statements because the
results are bad. All we can do is wait in fear and hope that the
results are just a little bit bad and not very bad.
Sam Sloan
samsloan
not keep notes of your meeting? Why would you not have a copy of the
budget that had been submitted to you for your approval? And why
would you not have made notes of any changes that the Board made to
it?
Then you could compare your copy with the budget Nolan posted. If
there were any discrepancies you could yell![/quote]
The board members were all given printouts of the budget. In addition,
several non-board members including Hal Bogner and Harry Payne were in
the room and they were given printouts as well.
Bill Goichberg expressed surprise and concern that the budget that had
been developed by Joel Channing and his Nine Wise Men only one week
earlier had been busted by the executive director who had added in a
bunch of new expenses including a 3.2% raise for the entire staff.
Then we went though a bunch of the new items and Bill Goichberg with
his handy pencil drew a line through some of them and wrote in some
new numbers and that is how we "balanced" the budget.
I voted against this by the way (not that it matters) and I reported
this in my posting to this group from Denver Airport on my way home.
The only way to find out whether the budget posted on the USCF home
page is the same that was passed at the Executive Board meeting would
be to get that original sheet with the new numbers written in by Bill
Goichberg.
Yes, it is true that I could have taken better notes but I never
imagined that two months would pass before the new budget would be
posted on uschess.org
Naturally, since the Executive Director had changed the budget passed
by the Nine Wise Men without telling them, I have great fear that he
changed the budget passed by the six stupid EB members as well.
Sam Sloan
mar...@stkittsnevischess.org
They are worried I am going to nail them on the building in Cherry
Hill. The building is worth 1 dollar (not two dollars.) That's right,
the NATIONAL HEADQUARTERS IS WORTH ONE DOLLAR. i want to see that line
item.
Marcus Roberts
Sam Sloan
Championships and other international events because there is nobody
to sign with. The Scholastic Council is just an advisory sub-committee
of the USCF with no independent contract signing authority. Members
come and go. The current chairman has just resigned. A scandal
occurred recently when he signed a contract as the "authorization
representative of the USCF" when he had no such contract signing
authority.
Also, conditions change from year to year. Some years for example the
players are REQUIRED to stay in a certain hotel, usual an above-market
rate hotel, and we have to pay the organizers so that they can take
their cut. Also, this year we are not sending a delegation to the Pan
Am Youth Championships because they are being held in Cali, Columbia
and the region is considered unsafe. I am not sure that I agree.
Several of our players just played in the Continental Championship in
Cali, Columbia and not even one of them was kidnapped and taken
hostage by the drug cartel. On the other hand, we sent a Youth
Delegation to Batumi, Georgia last year which is in the middle of a
civil war and nobody blinked.
Even though I am on the board I did not learn about this supposed deal
to raise entry-fees by $10 and use the money to send our players
overseas until two months ago when it came up are a result of
muck-raking by Donna Alarie. I was shocked by the deal. I guarantee
you that if the Great Unwashed Masses (my euphemism for the general
membership) find out about it (let's everyone here keep it a secret)
many will be enraged. Four years ago Tim Hanke ran for election on a
platform to "get rid of scholastic chess" and he was elected. A good
portion to the general membership is opposed to these special deals
for scholastic chess and will blow their tops if they hear about this.
Sam Sloan
asca...@aol.com
Here we are a month later.
In absolute terms I guess we are closer to the eventual presentation
of the financials but are we really?
How many times in the last ten years have the financials been restated
downwards after their official "release"?
How many times were they restated upwards??? Am I wrong in
remembering none?
How fortunate for the USCF that the Schultz years are coming to an
end.
Readers will recall Don's surprise when the financials of every year
of his own administration were restated downwards and that after those
years originally reported cummulative record losses. Many readers
will recall Don's unique method of only reporting the good months and
blaming the bad months on...gremlins. Who can forget Don's charts
which showed only plus side results while the federation was losing
record amounts.
Is the membership better off when they don't receive any statements at
all or are they better off when they are lied to by the administration
only to find out the miserable truth later.
ChessDon Caligulia's choice! Niro or Cavallo.
The LMA is a distant memory but its demise remains Don's legacy. Don
never recognized that he was spending other people's (life members)
money.
How many life members would have become life members if they knew
their funds would be squandered and misreported? $2,000,000 gone.
When my son and I became life members, we thought our memberships
would last our entire lifetimes. Now, the federation must be
depending on our early departures.
Each election we have hopes anew and each election we are manipulated
past the point of no return. How would one evaluate a board that
produces no financials? Is this better or worse than the Cavallo/
Schultz years when there were no BINFO documents at all (Reno) save a
couple of political attacks?
How many times can an organization come up for a possible last breath
only to be told everything is OK?
Don't worry ChessDon has been at the till.
Fortunately, no more.
Maybe now US Chess has a chance. Can we retire him from any contact
with FIDE?
Now about those current financials...
Since there were no financials, what slobbering drivel did the
insiders get the delegates to talk about this year? It is always
something. So it goes.
Richard Peterson
Bruce
>
> - Show quoted text -
hey Richard good to see you are still plugging away on here. While
Don is not a great steward I think that we have plenty of blame to go
around, stretching back to the bad old days where we first had
Cavallo, then DeFeis, then Niro and then Bill himself serving as ED.
I think the only positive balance years they ever really had in
operations was the year of the draconian staff cuts and the years
where they sold the building and moved.
Paul Rubin
> I think the only positive balance years they ever really had in
> operations was the year of the draconian staff cuts and the years
> where they sold the building and moved.
The positive balance years were when everyone was buying expensive
dedicated chess computers from the B&E operation. That was also when
the expensive habits developed. The market for dedicated chess
computers has dried up and gone. The expensive habits are still rampant.
Bruce
Actually there were strong suspicions even back then that B&E was not
nearly as profitable as everyone was led to believe if accounting had
properly figured the costs.
Even if so, the age of our great B&E sales were during the
administration of Al Lawrence who was ED prior to 1996. So it's been
over 10 years since they were in fact profitable in operations, except
in the year they cut staff.
asca...@aol.com
Ah the expensive computers.
Those were in the years before USCF adopted GAAP and those numbers
were bogus beyond words.
If memory serves, computers were given by a certain computer company
to USCF and their full retail value was credited as income.
We didn't sell them exactly.
We ended up giving away most of them.
We have a long long history of financial nonsense.
Richard Peterson