The Washington Township supervisors, to their credit, have demonstrated a willingness to get to the bottom of rumors surrounding the township's financially troubled fire department.
"I believe they should look at everything," Melvin Weiss, chairman of the board of supervisors, explained with reference to the decision to commission an audit of the department's financial records for the past five to seven years. "It has to be done."
Yes, it does, because that's the only way township residents can determine whether a sluggish economy or some kind of hanky-panky is responsible for the department's precarious financial condition.
While we commend the supervisors for attempting to pinpoint the problem with the fire department, we have a suggestion for them while they're in a truth-seeking mode.
We think they should also turn the auditors loose on Community Ambulance Service.
That's the outfit, you may recall, that was forced to shut down some time ago due to a myriad of problems, including the fact that the Internal Revenue Service froze its assets because the ambulance service owed the federal government some $140,000 in employee withholding taxes.
The problems that plagued CAS, including the apparently illegal use of tax money withheld from employee paychecks, gave rise to rumors about how the organization managed to get itself into such a deep financial hole -- the same kind of rumors that more recently targeted the fire department.
Any move to fix accountability for the problems CAS experienced would be every bit as welcome as the effort to pinpoint responsibility for the current financial condition of the fire department.
Are you listening, supervisorsâ¢
