Kenneth Hanbury, a 60-year-old deacon, was charged by Maryland State Police with embezzling more than $30,000 from Our Mother of Sorrows Parish in Centreville, Md., where he was the bookkeeper. "Any time you have money, there is going to be temptation, even though there are good people in our parishes," said Bob Krebs, a spokesman for the Diocese of Wilmington. In the diocese, each parish is required to have a financial council for oversight and to advise the pastor. And parish financial statements are reviewed each year at the diocesan level, said Krebs. A diocesan auditor visits a parish every two years to go over the books. That's also done when a pastor leaves a parish. The policy has been in place at least a decade, Krebs said. Still, Zech worries that embezzlements could be the next big crisis for the American Catholic Church. In his survey, almost 34 percent of financial officers said their biggest fear was the lack of financial controls at the parish level. Zech hates to say that churches are vulnerable because that "sounds like blaming the victim." Nevertheless, he said, embezzlement is a crime of opportunity and churches should make it harder for people to find that opportunity.
A congregation in shock No one has to convince the 220 worshippers at Newark's First Presbyterian Church of the need for oversight. The memory of the last three years is too fresh. A certified accounting firm, Wilmington's Jeter & Associates, showed that from January 2007 to December 2008, Carol Lind wrote at least 35 unauthorized checks that made their way to her bank. Lind, now in her 60s, was hired in the early 1990s as an office administrator and apparently did well under supervision, said Tom D. Runnels, a longtime member. "We're a loving congregation and that made us casual about our finances," Runnels said. The church had problems finding leadership and went through a period when pastors and interim pastors were there only a few years. During that period, financial oversight waned. The role of treasurer, which had been a volunteer role, was shifted to Lind. By 2000, she took care of vendor payments, processed payroll, monitored cash accounts, and prepared reports on the financial state of the church. She had control of the checkbook and wrote her own checks. "You could say it's a testament to faith that organizations run as badly as ours exist at all," Runnels said.
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2010 Media Report Villanova School of Business