The drubbing this city has taken because of Mike McLaughlin’s treachery is due the ineptitude, dereliction of duty or outright corruption of state auditors who knew McLaughlin was overpaying himself with funds he was not reporting.
We are told the auditors laughed and made light of the discrepancies that were revealed which gives the impression more distinctly and without an ounce of ambiguity that McLaughlin’s powers of personality were able to derail state auditors from doing what they are by law supposed to do.
They should have reported the discrepancy in his salary to higher officials and then action should have been immediately taken to strip McLaughlin of his position and to force him to pay back what he had been stealing.
Instead, the situation was allowed to go for six years – and through that time period – state auditors knew what was going on but failed to do anything about it.
Where is the Supreme Judicial Court when it is needed?
The appointment of a receiver for the CHA after McLaughlin had already gone was like a farmer closing the barn door after all the animals inside the barn had fled.
Who is investigating the state auditors who failed in their jobs and their oaths?
Where is the FBI and why haven’t they arrested these auditors?
Increasingly, the incident shows how Chelsea City Hall is absolutely outside of this obscene story of theft and greed by McLaughlin.
He was a pied piper unto himself and to a very few at the authority who did what he asked never believing until the end what he was asking for was wrong.
The thought of the same auditors now examining the books of other housing authorities is not cause for good feeling that the right thing is being done.
The truly extraordinary part of this story is that Chelsea’s Retirement Board chief thought McLaughlin’s reported salary on papers sent to him was a typo.
He called up the CHA and asked.
No. Its not a typo, he was told.
So he took that as a license to do nothing.
He is not a city appointment. He represents the employees of the city and is allowed a space inside city hall.
He knew what McLaughlin was being paid. He should have known the amount as listed was not a typo but an outrage and an outright theft.
But this never apparently occurred to him.
He consistently did nothing over the years. He remains sitting in his position of authority at city hall when in fact he ought to be removed and immediately.