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DEL.ICIO.USNeal Purcell honored by Atlanta Rotary Club
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
To his total surprise, Neal Purcell was awarded the Atlanta Rotary Club’s prestigious Ivan Allen Sr. award on Monday.
According to Dick Stormont, this year’s president of the club, is given to the “Rotarian “who has done the most for the club in the past year.”
Purcell, a retired national vice chairman of KPMG and a former Atlanta Rotary president, was on the dias to introduce visiting Rotarians and guests as well as share a couple of jokes.
He clearly had no idea he was about to receive the award named for one of the original founders of the club (and the father of the late Mayor Ivan Allen Jr.) until Stormont began reading off his bio.
Purcell didn’t even notice that his wife, Martha, had slipped into the lunch to see him receive the award. She was shielded by fellow Rotarian George Sands, also a retired KPMG executive, who helped orchestrate the surprise.
When the keynote speaker, Gov. Sonny Perdue, began his talk, he referred to Purcell by saying he had never known that an accountant could be funny.
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By Where's the accountability?
June 10, 2008 12:16 PM | Link to this
Well, there’s a reason why we accountants aren’t laughing much these days, both locally and state-wide.
Although Mayor Franklin took some initiative early on to tighten the city’s budget, and she courageously invested in the city’s sewer system infrastructure after decades of neglect by past mayors, recent events have shown that her accounting staff have completely dropped the ball with the city budget, producing a larger deficit than when Franklin first took office. It’s clear that there was no internal control framework was in place during her tenure to keep both city leaders and the public apprised of the true condition of city finances.
At the state level, billions of dollars worth of road projects were promised during Sonny’s tenure, but not delivered. Shockingly, control procedures to track project planning and implementation within the DOT appear to have been completely absent.
Furthermore, roads and interstates continue to be the sole focus of our investment in transportaion infrastructure statewide. Sonny, Casey and the legislature want to keep borrowing from taxpayers and spending on road projects, when millions of us would rather see our tax dollars spent on effective, efficient commute alternatives.
Not only does gasoline depend on the cost of crude oil but also the asphalt we use to create and re-pave our beloved roads! Does it make sense to continue to spend more and more of taxpayers’ dollars only on roads, in the face of rising construction costs, maintenance costs, and gasoline costs?
This, Sonny, is why many accountants aren’t all back-slapping, joke cracking hootin’-an’-a-hollerin’ good ol’ boys that he might prefer to rub elbows with. Our state is facing energy and transportation crises, but our leaders do nothing but borrow and spend taxpayers’ dollars on the same boondoggle road projects as always, when spending just on roads no longer makes good business sense. And, when they borrow and spend, there’s no internal control system in place to ensure that the funds are spent wisely.
Please tell me it’s all a joke. Maybe then more of us will laugh.