New County Treasurer Is No Stranger to Crises

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, the new Orange County treasurer, is the former state auditor and inspector of Oklahoma who has rescued government agencies, high-tech companies and a chaotic Resolution Trust Corp. processing center.

Appointed Thursday by the Orange County Board of Supervisors to a four-month term, Daxon succeeds Robert L. Citron, who was pressured to resign, and Matthew Raabe, Citron’s chief assistant, who served briefly as interim treasurer.

Daxon entered the Orange County crisis as leader of 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 that was on probation with the federal government and facing a cutoff of all federal money because of shoddy auditing 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, but was easily beaten by the incumbent, Democrat George Nigh. After his loss, he returned to his career as a certified public accountant, moved 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, after his hiring was announced.

Daxon, who has a bachelor’s degree in economics from Oklahoma State University, said Orange County’s crisis dwarfs most financial crises, but added that 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.”