Oakland Focus News | Oakland News Online Blog

Sf Chroncle's scribe and my cantankerous friend Chip Johnson wrote an article that saw the light of day , and then was forgotten -- until now. It involves Larae Brown, who was a Controller with the City of Oakland and according to Johnson, doing her job, which was finding flaws in bookkeeping. Seems she found a huge one: Chip Johnson reports: The trouble began in 2006 when Brown completed a reconciliation of more than 100 city bank accounts, a task she alleges had not been performed since 1999 - and what she found was extremely troubling. In her review, she discovered the city's cash balance was overstated by $172 million and 77 of 111 city accounts showed negative fund balances. By her estimates, all that was left in city coffers were bond funds, whose use is restricted by state law. When she raised concerns with her superiors, the suit claims, she was told that City Administrator Deborah Edgerly had devised a 10-year repayment plan to cover a half-dozen negative fund balan