O.C. IN BANKRUPTCY : Daxon Arrives With a Resume of Successful Turnarounds

The man asked to help save Orange County is a kind of financial firefighter with 20 years of front-line experience.

Thomas E. Daxon, 46, former state auditor and inspector of Oklahoma, has rescued government agencies, high-tech companies and a chaotic Resolution Trust Corp. processing center.

Now, he will tackle the Orange County crisis, leading a team of accountants from Arthur Andersen & Co., where Daxon was an adviser on government audit and account issues from 1983 to 1989.

Elected Oklahoma’s state auditor in 1979, Daxon inherited an office on probation with the federal government and faced a cutoff of all federal money because of shoddy audit practices.

After one year under Daxon, the office was taken off probation.

Daxon tried to build on his political success with a 1982 bid for governor. Running as a Reagan Republican, he was easily beaten by the incumbent, Democrat George Nigh.

Throughout the campaign, Daxon combined a passion for government with a penchant for numbers. Repeatedly, he warned that Nigh’s spending policies were jeopardizing the treasury. When his warnings went unheeded, he returned to his career as a certified public accountant, moved his family to Virginia and signed on with Andersen.

Most recently, Daxon managed an investment partnership that made rescue loans to high-tech companies. He also took control of a widely criticized Resolution Trust processing center, clearing up six months of unreconciled accounts.

“We’ve got to get to the bottom of this and find out what the problem is,” he said Monday, shortly after his hiring was announced. “We’ve got to sit down and start asking questions. It’ll be a while before we have any answers.”

Daxon, who has a bachelor’s degree in economics from the Oklahoma State University, said Orange County’s crisis dwarfs most financial crises, but he said he and his team of accountants are up to the challenge.

As his first formal act, Daxon gave approval to the supervisors’ efforts at freezing spending.

“I was very pleased with the action that the board took today,” he said. “They clearly want to do what’s best for the county--get control of the situation and turn it around.”