ASHE IN AMERICA — OPINION
At the GOP State Central Committee meeting on August 5, the new Finance Committee read out their first Financial Report. While last month I speculated about the obstruction, the report’s findings paint a more corrupt and scandalous picture.
The election took place on March 11, and the (peaceful) transfer of power was expected to begin immediately. The Finance Committee got started on April 1, but they didn’t gain access to the financial accounts of the party until April 14 when four accounts were turned over by the prior administration, which withheld access for more than a month. But that’s not all.
In early May, as the new team was preparing to file their April FEC report, the new finance team discovered additional accounts that were not previously disclosed. I will refer to these three additional accounts as the “hidden accounts.” The new administration was added to these accounts on May 4, nearly two months after they assumed the leadership of the party.
If that doesn’t convince you the prior administration was obstructing the new leadership, consider that access to the party’s QuickBooks account was never turned over. It still hasn’t been. The new administration received an older version of QuickBooks from the accountant on May 12, but it is not the most up to date, and there is critical information missing.
What information? Well, as I reported last month, the prior administration paid themselves bonuses after suffering a horrifying defeat in the 2022 midterms. The December 2022 statement indicated a “payroll bonus” of $45,000.00, but the specifics of how this sum —comprising nearly half of the previously reported funds — was distributed.
Those specifics would need to be pulled from the payroll system. You can guess what happened next. The payroll administrator is refusing to turn over the access information, and the payroll company, iSolvedHCM, is refusing to grant access to the new administration.
My sources in the GOP will not name the administrator. They would only describe her —– they used female pronouns — as a “long time employee” of the party who represented “the institutional memory that served multiple administrations.”
As for the payroll company, it took the new party leadership significant digging to even determine who the vendor was, and they had to threaten them legally to get the W-2 and 941 tax forms required to file the party’s taxes. To date, they still refuse to send the ledger, so the specifics of outgoing funds remain a mystery. The administrator still refuses to share the username and password.
It’s clearly obstruction — but not just obstruction. There is evidence of corruption —waste, fraud, and abuse.
Waste: The party was paying nearly $800/mo for three storage units that were mostly empty. One of the storage units appears to be full of garbage from the images. That’s $9,600 per year in wasted funds!
Fraud: The day before the election, emails show that the statements for the health insurance were changed to go to the administrator’s home address, and the financial account was changed to one of the hidden accounts. The administrator prepaid a year of insurance premiums, at a time when there were no employees, and then hid the transactions and the statements. The premiums were also significantly larger.
Abuse: In the month of April, an undisclosed person charged hundreds of dollars to the party’s FedEx account. There was no activity from the new administration, no official party business that explains these charges. This person appeared to be using the account for personal reasons more than a month after the election. Was this a common practice during the prior administration?
My sources declined to comment on whether they will bring legal action against the prior administration. They are focused on restoring the party to the people and cleaning up the financial mess left by Kristi Burton Brown and her team.
But make no mistake that it’s a scandalous mess. The new administration had to explicitly make a new rule that, “No employee writes a check to her/himself again.” Hard to imagine a serious professional environment with such a practice. No wonder the Colorado GOP has failed Republican voters for years.
It remains to be seen if the new leadership can restore the public’s trust.
Ashe Epp is a writer and activist. You can find all her work at Linktree.com/asheinamerica