Chapter 9 - TOM BENNETT'S EMAIL
Tom Bennett found an old email.
Three months before Emily reviewed the invoices, Tom had questioned duplicate Sentinel charges.
TOM:
Can you explain why January supplemental patrol appears again in March?
MARGARET:
Different allocation cycle. Already verified.
TOM:
Can Sentinel confirm?
MARGARET:
Tom, please stop micromanaging vendors you don’t understand.
Then:
MARGARET:
I handle security. You handle treasury reporting.
That was revealing.
Not criminal.
Controlling.
Then Tom found another email from Sentinel.
SENTINEL:
Margaret, we need a decision on how to categorize the advisory credit.
MARGARET:
Keep it off the HOA-facing invoice.
There.
The advisory payment was not merely forgotten.
It was intentionally separated.
Why?
Margaret said:
“Because it wasn’t an HOA expense.”
Technically true.
May you like
But it was a vendor benefit tied to the person approving the vendor’s contract.
Governance problem.
