ORANGE COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : Not Exactly a Role Model

It may be too late to spare the Irvine Temporary Housing agency its troubles. But its experiences can prove useful to itself and others entrusted with public money. Among the lessons: If something doesn’t look right, it may be because it isn’t. If something seems too good to be true, it may be because it is. And no system, however carefully devised, is foolproof.

Irvine Temporary Housing, a nonprofit agency that provides short-term housing for homeless families in Irvine and surrounding communities, is the latest agency to be caught off guard by a financial scandal. It is still reeling from the recent arrest of its executive director, Clyde E. Weinman, who was charged with forging his signature on agency checks totaling $450,000 and diverting much of that money for his own personal use. Whatever the outcome of the case against Weinman, who says he is innocent, the agency clearly is out many thousands of dollars sorely needed for its work.

The agency’s troubles follow closely on the heels of financial scandals in the nearby city of Newport Beach and the Newport-Mesa Unified School District, both of which have been defrauded of huge sums of money.

The obvious need is for tighter controls at the administrative and directors’ levels. Also, the recent sour experiences of these agencies point to the need for society to do a better job of educating its citizens about values, including honesty and responsibility, compassion, perseverance, respectfulness, cooperation, courage and citizenship. That list, by the way, was developed by a task force--including teachers, parents, a priest, a minister and a rabbi--and adopted by Irvine Unified School District as something it wants its schools to emphasize. Other schools should follow this example.

Hindsight is 20/20, of course. Guarding against fraud in the future will be harder than seeing past deficiencies. Agencies like Irvine Temporary Housing have a duty to set in place good backup monitoring systems that don’t leave the accounting to one pair of eyes. Oversight just makes good sense.

As for the rest of us, we have a duty to teach our children well, and provide them with good examples.