2017 Audit Fraud: Capital Assets

​City Lists $414,959,273 in Capital Assets, but $400 Million is Forged

$415 Million is the amount of Infrastructure the City of Beaumont should have after acquiring bond debt and collecting taxes. $15 Million is the amount of Infrastructure the City actually has.

City Hall, the Police Station, and the Fire Station are well over 30 years old and have no value after depreciation. There is no Recycled Water Facility and the Sewer is deteriorated beyond repair.

$400 Million has been Embezzled from the City of Beaumont. $300 Million was Embezzled from the Bonds and $100 Million was Embezzled from Taxes/Fees paid. We know the money was embezzled because:

1. Records show the money was paid out for ‘Engineering Services’ and ‘Planning Services’.

2. The Infrastructure does not exist.

‘Capital Assets’ and ‘Infrastructure’ are actual brick and mortar construction, not ‘Services’. There has to be a Receipt and/or Serial Number to prove the Infrastructure exist or a professional assessment of the Infrastructure. Classifying Money paid to Lawyers, Consultants, Engineers, and Planners as ‘Infrastructure’ is Fraud; an intentional lie.

On Beaumont’s past Audited Financial Statements the line that recorded the Capital Assets was left blank because almost all of the CFD and Sewer Bond money was Embezzled, so there was no Infrastructure to record.

Beaumont now claims that ‘all the receipts were destroyed’. Nobody destroys receipts or legal documents – they only destroy the fraudulent documents.

At the June 5, 2018 Beaumont City Council Meeting Vanessa Burke, former Urban Futures Employee now Pun Group Auditor, made clear that the Capital Assets were inventoried by a ‘Consultant’. Burke failed to mention that the ‘Consultant’ was her as an Urban Futures Employee.

The City of Beaumont refuses to release the list of Capital Assets and Depreciation used on the 2017 Audited Financial Statements. City Manager Todd Parton stated at the June 19, 2018, City Council Meeting that the Capital Asset List is ‘still in draft form’ and won’t be released until ‘July or August’.

Translation: Beaumont will never release the List of Capital Assets because they know the numbers are forged. The Council Approved an Audit knowing their Staff can not validate the numbers. Vanessa Burke went from creating the fraudulent 2017 Financial Statements to being the Lead Auditor of the City’s fraudulent 2017 Financial Statements.

June 5, 2018 Beaumont City Council Transcript:

3:12:00 Burke: I’m not going to go through the detail on the Capital Assets Infrastructure Accounting. We did consider the methods and assumptions used by the Consultants hired and we determined those to be reasonable.

3:17:00 Nancy Carroll: Last night you talked extensively about how thorough you were in reviewing how the Capital Assets were done, that you did comparisons and you looked at the history of how the amount was ascertained. Some of the Council Members weren’t here for that. Would you just restate that for them?

3:18:00 Burke: There was someone hired to do the inventory, a Consultant. And a Consultant hired came up with the estimated values of the Capital Assets and we looked at the assumptions and the methods used. So for example; we might look at how many miles of roads you have and how much that costs you to construct a mile of road today. Then we look back as to when that road was placed in service. We have to do a ‘present value calculation’ that goes back using inflationary rates back to the original cost of that Asset. And that is an estimate. Under GASB 34 an estimate is allowable in the absence of actual records.

Beaumont City Council Meeting Transcript June 19, 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbAe1PpdQOU

City Manger Todd Parton: One of the things we accomplished this year was finishing out the Capital Asset Inventory and Depreciation Schedule. We actually had the Pun Group work with another independent Consultant to review where we are to get us into GASB compliance with that effort. That Consultant is going to create a final Report for Council that we will be presenting to the Finance and Audit Committee and then to City Council. So you’ll have the full completed final Report with all the work and the details that went behind that. It’s a Draft document right now with some basic spreadsheets, so that’s an additional final piece that we want to present to you. So that will be coming July, August timeframe for the Audit Committee and City Council.