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The propaganda from the former regime continues unabated.
In a desperate attempt to dodge accountability for the city’s double digit million dollar fiscal emergency, apologists, minions, and political operatives for the Schertzer administration and former City Auditor Kelly Carr are leaning heavily on a fabricated political delusion: the myth that Marion’s finances were once managed with “award-winning” excellence.
Local lore dictates that during the height of the previous administration’s tenure, the Auditor’s office received a prestigious financial excellence award.
The reality is far more cynical.
The administration did not win an award for financial health, fiscal responsibility, solvency, or bulletproof internal controls.
However Marion Watch knows what happened, we were there.
We have been saving this one to see how many times it would be blindly repeated under the current administration, and more importantly HOW it is SAID.
Experience in the local Marion circus arena since 2009 has taught us that the way a situation is WORDED can tell you the possible SOURCE of the propaganda.
They won a participation trophy for formatting.
It simply looked pretty.
It simply looked pretty.
BEYOND THE CARR ADMINISTRATION: THE LORE LIVES ON
The most disturbing aspect of this formatting facade is that it did not leave City Hall when Kelly Carr and Scott Schertzer exited.
The echo chamber remains entirely intact.
As highlighted in recent publications by MarionWatch.com, current city officials sitting in council committees are still falling back on this fabricated lore.
When confronted by citizens regarding the staggering scale of the city’s financial collapse, officials have actively interrupted them to regurgitate the myth of Marion’s past “financial excellence” and “award-winning” audits.
Before elected officials interrupt citizens and investigative researchers who have dedicated years and several thousand hours of forensic research into Marion’s financial catastrophe, and many other subjects, they need to get their story straight.
Parroting the propaganda of a failed regime does not alter the digital chain of custody.
It does not erase the millions in unappropriated GL overrides.
It does not fix the $8.7 million enterprise utility drain.
And it certainly does not reverse a state-declared Fiscal Emergency.
It does look pretty though!
You cannot out-format a compromised system.
When the tribal knowledge required to execute these manual workarounds finally vacated the Auditor’s office in 2020, the facade instantly shattered.
The 2021 audit detonated with 11 of 14 opinion units qualified, eventually plunging the city into a Fiscal Emergency immediately following Marion Watch Investigates aggressive reporting and escalations.
The financial excellence award was never proof of a solvent city; it was the ultimate smokescreen. It was an award for how pretty the report was, not how well Marion managed its books.
THE CAMOUFLAGE GAME: BURYING THE ROT IN THE FOOTNOTES
The folklore of Marion’s “award-winning” finances began in 2013, when Auditor Kelly Carr submitted the city’s first self-prepared Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) to the Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA).
In her official transmittal letter, Carr proudly heralded the submission, boasting that the city’s finances were “stabilizing”.
According to multiple officials and city employees both past and present, this was a highly calculated pivot designed to change the packaging of a failing system.
The primary source documents from our IT Blueprints strongly support this conclusion.
The administration originally justified purchasing the million-dollar New World system by citing a prior “ghost theft,” yet immediately deactivated the software’s automated workflows—paving the way for a second, very real utility embezzlement from 2011 to 2014.
Facing this active theft, 34 state audit citations between 2010 and 2012, drastically expanding negative fund balances, and a General Ledger override drain that exploded from $628,032 in 2009 to an unfathomable $16,062,830 in 2010 alone—ultimately driving toward a cumulative total of $24.9 million by 2021—the administration desperately needed a smokescreen to hide the raw math.
Outside the echo chamber of City Hall, the GFOA Certificate of Achievement is universally understood by enterprise professionals as an award for documentation layout, not financial stability.
The GFOA explicitly states the foundational purpose of the program: “The goal of the program is not to assess the financial health of participating governments, but rather to ensure that users of their financial statements have the information they need to do so themselves.”
The city’s own audit documents openly admit that the GFOA certificate is awarded simply for publishing an “easily readable and efficiently organized” document.
A city can be hemorrhaging cash, running massive negative fund balances, and turning a blind eye to disabled software hard-stops, and still win the GFOA award—so long as those failures are properly typeset and documented in accordance with program standards and GAAP guidelines.
By publishing a dense, hundreds-of-pages CAFR, the administration projected an illusion of perfection.
They quietly buried catastrophic IT breakdowns, illegal overrides, and structural deficits deep inside the footnotes, banking on the hope that the people of Marion were too uneducated to actually look at the report and find what was hidden.
Or at least that is the viewpoint of current officials, some former officials, and the majority of the public who are now seeing the former regime’s official narrative doesn’t even make sense next to primary source evidence.
Something Marion Watch learned long ago.
But as long as it looks pretty it’s OK right?
Wrong, Marion citizens are more than capable of understanding this complex information and the truth will continue to be told without expiration.
A DECADE OF DISASTER HIDDEN IN THE FINE PRINT (2009–2020)
While politicians were framing a formatting certificate, an award for looking pretty, the financial architecture of the city was collapsing.
The Silent Sabotage forensic IT blueprints reveal an infrastructure actively manipulated to conceal insolvency.
By 2018, the facade could no longer hold the weight of the hidden data, and the governmental unrestricted net position suffered a total collapse, crashing to an unfathomable negative $39,835,858.
The State was forced to issue a Federal Material Weakness for the city’s complete failure to conduct physical capital-asset inventories, leaving massive negative balances entirely unverified.
Here is a concise breakdown of how they hid the bleeding.
The rest, including the full and special overview series can be seen at Marionwatch.com/SilentSabotage:
• The Deficit Shell Game: In her 2013 CAFR transmittal letter, the Auditor bragged about a “drastic improvement” that eliminated the General Fund deficit. The data proved this was a shell game. They didn’t fix the deficit; they simply shifted the bleeding. Buried deep in Note 4, the audit revealed that the newly created Police, Dispatch, and Fire Income Tax fund had crashed into a $1,131,129 deficit. In total, nine separate funds ran deficit balances totaling $3,882,731 that year.
• The Hawthorne Effect & Utility Theft: With software workflows deactivated, Utility Supervisor Brenda Nwosu embezzled $34,276 undetected between January 2011 and August 2014 by manually reducing 71 customer balances to zero. To obscure structural insolvency, the city continually executed massive bad-debt write-offs, wiping out $1.64 million in uncollectible sanitation accounts in 2010 and another $1.64 million in 2011. However, the exact moment criminal investigators began pulling utility records in 2014, the uncollectible sanitation adjustments abruptly plummeted to -$7,071. Once the immediate scrutiny cleared, the write-offs shot right back up to $140,528 in 2015—a textbook demonstration of the Hawthorne Effect. This caught the attention of information technology, financial, and law enforcement professionals on our team and within our network many years ago.
• “Unrecorded Activity” Plugs: Because the automated Bank Reconciliation module was deliberately abandoned in 2009, the New World software could not balance mathematically. To force the CAFR to tie out at year-end, administrators blindly injected “Unrecorded Activity” ghost data into the ledgers. They plugged $160,237 into the General Fund in 2014, another $73,839 in 2015, a staggering $1,289,260 into the Street Fund in 2016, and another $42,427 in 2017. You do not get million-dollar “unrecorded activity” plugs if a Tier-1 financial system is actually tracking cash.
• Illegal “Long-Term” Interfund Loans: With structural deficits masked, the administration began quietly executing unauthorized long-term loans between funds to keep the city afloat. Buried in Note 12 of the 2016 and 2017 CAFRs, the city confessed to holding balances due to the General Fund consisting of “loans made to provide working capital”. Using restricted utility funds as a zero-interest bank to float a bleeding General Fund is a massive red flag for systemic insolvency.
• Burying the Massive GL Override Drain: Because the administration disabled budgetary hard-stops, they illegally overspent legal appropriations year after year, with overrides exploding from $628,032 in 2009 and $16,062,830 in 2010 alone, ultimately driving toward a cumulative total of $24.9 million by 2021. Instead of front-page citations, these illegal General Ledger overrides were tucked away in Note 4, reaching a running total of $19,303,846 by 2017.
THE “LOW-RISK” LIE (2016–2020)
The CAFR camouflage worked incredibly well on the state auditors, who missed these catastrophic failures happening right under their noses and actively shielded the city from federal scrutiny.
From 2016 through 2020, the Ohio Auditor of State illegally designated Marion as a “Low-Risk Auditee” under federal guidelines.
Federal law strictly prohibited this status because Marion had received back-to-back Material Weaknesses: first in 2015 for the utility embezzlement, and again in 2017 for bypassing Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) procurement rules.
By erroneously checking “Yes” for Low-Risk status for five consecutive years, the state auditors artificially dropped the federal testing threshold from 40% down to 20%. This egregious oversight blindly shielded the bleeding digital vault from the deep forensic scrutiny that would have exposed the rot years earlier.
This illegal streak went on until the 2021 audit, when the Auditor of State finally dropped the hammer, checked “No,” and officially stripped the city of its low-risk status, classifying Marion as a High-Risk Auditee.
There’s a left side…
A right side…
And then there’s the TRUTH!!
WE WANT THE TRUTH!