My Job
An Auditor's Career Notebook - Part 3
The Office of Technical Assistance
The manager of the Office of Technical Assistance in the Virgin Islands was a wonderful lady named Linda Lance. Linda soon became a close family friend
and we still keep in touch with each other on a regular basis, although she is now retired and living in the United States. At this time, OTIA was pushing to
increase the level of hands-on technical assistance given to the GVI. Therefore, in addition to allowing me to transfer from the Comptroller's Office to the
Office of Technical Assistance, OTIA temporarily detailed three more auditors from the Comptroller's Office to work on technical assistance projects. One of
the first and more time-consuming projects to which we were assigned was to help the V.I. Department of Finance catch up on a backlog of government bank
account reconciliations. This might not sound like a big task, but the GVI's bank accounts, through which tens of thousands of checks and thousands of
deposits are processed every month, were in some cases several years in arrears with their reconciliations. The four members of our task group worked
side-by-side with Department of Finance personnel to bring the bank account reconciliations up to date. Meanwhile, Linda worked with the Department of
Finance's Data Processing Division to help define the needs and specifications for a modernized and computerized accounting system.
1979 - Office of Technical Assistance manager Linda Lance, Comptroller's
Office auditors
Phil Atkinson and Patrick Samsell, and my wife
One of the unintended perks of working at the Department of Finance was that we were very near the Kronprindsens Market, a new shopping and dining arcade
located just a few doors down from the Department of Finance. Phil Atkinson, one of the auditors detailed from the Comptroller's Office, and I used to spend
our two designated 15-minute coffee breaks each day at Kronprindsens Market playing video games, like Asteroids and Missile Command, which were all the
craze at the time. Phil retired a few years later and flew his single-engine Piper Warrior airplane solo all the way back to his hometown in Massachusetts.
Several years later, when I was with the Office of Inspector General (OIG), Scott Tilley, one of our auditors, and I would sometimes spend our lunch break at
the game room of the Frenchman's Reef Resort playing Q-bert, Donkey Kong, or some other second generation video game. Traffic in downtown Charlotte
Amalie was so light in those days that it only took us 15 minutes to drive from the office to the hotel. We'd then play the video games for a half hour and still
have 15 minutes to drive back to the office. Scott later transferred to OIG's Central Region Office in Denver.
Linda moved back to the United States around 1982, and I was put in charge of continuing the technical assistance work in the Virgin Islands. The three
detailed auditors went back to their auditing duties at the Comptroller's Office, and I continued working on a project started under Linda's tenure of helping the
Department of Finance develop procedural manuals for each of its operating units. As part of this project, I developed manuals for the Bank Reconciliation,
Revenue Audit, Accounts Receivable, Collection Enforcement, and Disbursement branches -- the last one being completed in July 1983.
By that time, OTIA was losing interest in the hands-on technical assistance approach, and the new Director of OTIA, Pedro Sanjuan, soon turned my Systems
Accountant position into nothing more than a liaison officer status, with my most important duty being to make sure that each day's copies of the local
newspapers were mailed to him in Washington. My level of job satisfaction didn't last very long under that situation but, luckily, big changes had been taking
place across the hall at the Comptroller's Office.
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