Page A2From§Eachthe early bird edition — 1 October 2026
As it ran on the front
California's controller audits other people's payroll for a living. That is the whole job: catch the overpayment before it clears. So when a new state audit landed on Controller Malia Cohen's own office this week, the examiners did to the controller exactly what the controller's office does to everyone else.
What they found, inside the controller's own personnel file: staff had been overpaid, and the office had set up what the audit calls an odd reimbursement arrangement to deal with it — an arrangement the audit flags as a possible violation of state law. All together now — read the line where the agency that signs off on other departments' paychecks needed a workaround to square its own.…
…(cont) The same audit found two managers drawing California state paychecks while working from Idaho and Alabama, and it says they tried to keep that quiet. A state salary, an out-of-state address, and a line in the audit that exists only because somebody else opened the file and looked. That is the shape of the finding — not a disclosure, a catch.
The same week, a second personnel file opened, this one at City College of San Francisco. Trustees there are investigating whether Chancellor Kimberlee Messina's $350,000 salary was padded with vacation days she did not take. Phantom days, a real paycheck, the same structure as the controller's office: the person closest to the books is the one who signed off on them.
Neither filing says the two offices talked to each other, and nothing in either audit suggests they know the other exists. What they share is plainer than a conspiracy and, in its way, harder to explain away: each office already had, sitting in its own personnel department, the records it needed to catch what it was doing to itself — and caught none of it until an outside auditor or a board of trustees asked to see the file.
All together now, one more time — the agency whose entire purpose is finding other people's payroll mistakes spent this week being found. That is not a scandal with a villain in it. It is a filing cabinet, read by the wrong person at the right time, which is apparently the only way anyone in California government gets their own time sheet checked.
“The agency that's supposed to catch government paycheck mistakes in California couldn't catch its own, and had to get caught by somebody else's audit. Same week, a college chancellor's $350,000 salary turns out to have phantom vacation days built into it. Nobody in that file is self-policing — they're self-serving, and the only reason the rest of us know is because somebody from outside finally opened the drawer.”
“This is a technical audit finding, not a scandal — large agencies make payroll adjustments all the time, and the reimbursement setup was simply unconventional, not improper. The Idaho and Alabama arrangement is just modern remote work, very forward-thinking for state government — well, the audit does say they tried to hide it, so maybe I pull back on "forward-thinking." Did I say any of that out loud? That doesn't sound like me.”
The receipts
The Pentagon has failed its audit eight years running - the only major federal agency never to pass one Military Times, 19 December 2025
California’s top fiscal watchdog botched staff payments, let managers work from Idaho, AlabamaController Malia Cohen’s office was called out in a new state audit for overpaying staff and then cooking up an odd reimbursement scheme, potentially violating state law. Two managers also worked from Idaho and Alabama and tried to hide it.
Teachers spent an average of $895 of their own money on classroom supplies last school year AdoptAClassroom.org 2025 Teacher Spending Survey
SF college boss under fire over alleged pay-padding scheme and phantom vacation daysCity College of San Francisco trustees are investigating allegations that Chancellor Kimberlee Messina padded her $350,000 salary.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.