Hello,
I was pretty amused by Erik's comment in response to Thomas Dalton.
On 3/4/08, Thomas Dalton <_thomas.dalton at gmail.com_ (https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l) > wrote:
Any idea where Danny got that idea from? Is it purely imagination, or was there some wine incident?
As geni pointed out, he did not actually make that claim. His blog entry is carefully constructed to do the maximum damage to the reputation of the Foundation and to Jimmy Wales personally, without making many (any?) actionable, specific claims. (Not that legal action against trash blogs would actually be a good idea -- it only gives them the attention that they seek.)
Generally speaking, at the time when Jimmy was essentially still running the Foundation, the organization was tiny (first employee in 2005) and didn't have the kinds of reimbursement procedures and controls you'd expect, so what'd happen is that Jimmy would scribble "Wikia" on a receipt, or maybe lose it entirely. Then there would be some back and forth about what it meant, etc. When anything was in doubt, Jimmy would write the Foundation a check later to make sure everything was fully covered. In fact, he hasn't claimed many expenses which would be perfectly reasonable.
Actually, Erik, if you had been there at the time you would know that there were very stringent controls in place regarding all expenses. Every receipt was matched to a credit card item, numbered, photocopied, scanned and filed in two separate locations: paper and electronic. Each item was also entered into an accounting program (Quickbooks) and maintained on Excel spread sheets. This was well established when I (the second employee and the first to work in the office) began a month after the first employee, and only began to fall apart when Brad took over the accounting, since he was not as scrupulous in his record keeping. Should you still have the old hard drives in the office, I am sure you will find them in the directory named Barbara. I also hope that you moved the paper files with you to San Francisco so you can verify that they match. While scanning endless receipts was a real pain, the intersection of Quickbooks, paper, and electronic copies made it easy to locate.
As for professionalism, the person who designed and managed this system was an MBA CPA who also happened to employ Jimmy as a trader.
But then again, you weren't there so you wouldn't know.
Danny
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