There were many changes in the first part of 1988. The regulatory agency had a new Supervisor. John had been Betty's attorney assigned to her as counsel in the pursuit of the accounting problem. Obviously, I was not privy to their discussions on how to attack the problem created by the managers whose plan to correct a problem with GAAP would serve as a textbook example for the rule. However, John was much more vicious than Betty was.
He went after the jobs of these four managers. His tactic was to attend a board meeting and have the manager excused. He would then present his case for dismissing the manager to the board. In the case of Jim Whyte, one of the founding fathers of the local credit union movement, he was called back in to learn he was being fired.
One of the most difficult aspects of consulting is that people often don't want advice; they want advocacy. Certainly, consultants can never ethically accept jobs that require advocacy over sound operation. That is the function of marketing departments.
The state had imposed an accounting principle known as "lower of cost or market" (LOCOM) because of the nature of the problem the credit unions had created. Though Bert would have preferred me to figure out a way that LOCOM accounting was unreasonable, he accepted the fact that there was nothing we could do about it.
In a matter of two months, I left Telco Credit Union to open up a consulting business, and then closed the consulting business because Credit Union of Puget Sound (CUPS) was using me full time. I was settled into my new position as Administrative Assistant to Bert Noel when he called me into his office.
He put a memo from the state examiners in front of me and asked me if I had ever heard of a minor infraction cited in detail. It was some really minor error in the way the credit union accounted for something. I had not ever seen such a write up before, but I also had to admit that I wasn't an accountant. I asked him what Chet or Kenny had said about it. He hadn't talked to them. He had just received the memo from the state examiner who was posted in the accounting department since the credit union had been put on the watch list for an investment and accounting problem.
