The landscaping company was the part that made the retired auditor stop smiling. He asked the woman who had pulled the bank records whether the board had ever approved a landscaping contract, and she said there was one in the minutes from May. I knew that wasn’t true because I’d been at that meeting, and we spent most of it arguing about the water shutoff schedule. There had been no vote for landscaping. The auditor asked her to print the contract from the association’s files, and she found one. It was dated May 3, signed by the president, and it authorized the company to receive exactly twenty-seven thousand dollars every month. I asked what they were supposed to be doing for that money, and the woman said mowing, trimming, seasonal cleanup, and irrigation maintenance. I looked out my window at the neighborhood and said nobody had done any of those things. Then the auditor asked who owned the company.
The woman searched the state business registry on her laptop, and the room went quiet when the filing came up. The landscaping company had been registered two months before the contract was signed. Its registered agent was the same person who had been the association’s treasurer until last year. I asked whether that was legal, and the auditor said the bigger question was whether the board had disclosed the relationship to the homeowners. The woman started scrolling through the bank statements again. Every payment from the second account went out on a Friday, and every Friday it was almost exactly the same amount. But then she found something that didn’t match the contract. The landscaping company wasn’t receiving twenty-seven thousand dollars. It was receiving twenty-nine thousand, because there was a separate payment every month labeled “emergency grounds maintenance.” The auditor asked her to click on the oldest payment, and the invoice attached to it was for work supposedly done during a week when the entire community was under a burn ban and the association had shut down all outdoor maintenance.
I thought that was the end of it until she opened the bank’s vendor details. The landscaping company had changed its business address three times, but the account number had never changed. The payee information showed that the money wasn’t being deposited into a business account at all. It was going into an account under an individual’s name. The auditor leaned toward the screen and asked her to read the name out loud. She did. It was the name of the board president’s daughter — and the first payment into that account had been made three days before she joined the board.
