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The Rice Thresher
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by Elizabeth Jardina Thresher editorial staff
Only when the current treasurer looked back at old bank statements did she find that 1998-2000 Brown Treasurer David Nunez wrote at least two checks to himself, one without the required second signature and the other with a forged signature. Nunez (Brown '00) admitted to stealing $3,000 from Brown in an e-mail sent out to the college Wednesday evening. Nunez said he used the money to help a terminally ill friend who died at the end of the last academic year. He sent $7,000 worth of repayment to Brown over the course of last semester. Of that sum, $3,000 was for money he admitted to taking along with a $400 penalty. Nunez also paid for $1,200 for questionable reimbursements he made to himself and about $1,000 in late fees and insufficient fund charges the college amassed while he was treasurer. The rest of the money, about $1,400, he volunteered as a "gift" to the college, he said. Brown Treasurer Sarah Czarnota said she discovered the theft in April when she looked through records to see if a check from the previous year had been cashed. She noticed a record of a $2,000 check cashed to Nunez, an unusually large amount to reimburse a student. "About a week later, I pulled up the digital image of the check, and there was a forged signature there," she said. Brown Coordinator Nancy Henry's name was written as the second signature, but the signature looked forged. Henry confirmed that the signature was not hers, so Czarnota immediately went to talk to then-Brown President Tim Werner. The next day, they talked to Brown Master Albert Pope. "I approached Albert because I didn't feel comfortable dealing with it myself," Czarnota said. "I asked him to talk to Dave and see what he thought about it. We were told that it was a 'friend-in-need' situation, and it was a poor judgment call [that] shouldn't have been done but it was." Nunez admitted to the theft and agreed to pay back $2,500. The extra $500 would serve as a penalty. But Brown's financial troubles remained unresolved. Over the summer, Brown received a $10,000 Food and Housing bill. The money was two years' worth of Orientation Week housing costs, some repair costs and fines. Brown didn't have $10,000 in its bank account. Czarnota started looking through the books from the past two years "just to see where our money from the year had gone," she said. "I came across several other checks. In Quicken they were listed as being made out to 'student,' which I thought was strange." Because of this, Czarnota and Werner decided to audit the college's books. "So Tim and I sat down one Saturday and just went through everything from the past two years, check by check," she said. They found a number of other checks Nunez had written reimbursing himself for expenses that had no attached receipts. "I think that as treasurer, you know you need to have receipts," Czarnota said. "If everybody else is required to have receipts, you especially do." Nunez addressed these checks in his apology letter to Brown. "While these large reimbursements were for legitimate causes (ex. expenses incurred while coordinating Beer-Bike), I understand how they may appear suspicious," he wrote. Also, Werner and Czarnota discovered a number of fees the college had incurred because of insufficient funds in Brown's bank account. Nunez apparently did not deposit the college fee checks paid by students at the beginning of each year until late in the fall semester. "In August and September, you get in the huge chunk of money that you're going to spend for the rest of the year, and your balance goes down from there," Czarnota said. "He waited until November to deposit almost all the dues checks. Meanwhile, we got a negative balance in our account." Those fees totaled just over $1,000. At a meeting of the masters, resident associates, Henry, Czarnota and Werner, it was decided that Pope would call Nunez and tell him about a potential audit. According to Werner, Nunez was vague on the phone, but called Pope back to tell him about a $1,000 check he'd written to himself. He then claimed he'd repaid the money. Czarnota said she couldn't find any record of a deposit. "It called into question anything that had been written to him, because at this point obviously we didn't trust him," she said. "It had happened more than once." Werner and Czarnota began drafting a letter to Nunez in late June demanding repayment for the suspicious checks in addition to the fees he allowed to accumulate. They wanted him to send about $5,600 by mid-August so the money could be recovered for O-Week. Nunez responded almost a month later with a package. In it, he included four post-dated checks and letters for Czarnota and Werner, Henry and the masters. The first check, dated Sept. 30, was for $2,000. The rest of the checks were dated for the end of the months of October through December. The first three were for $2,000 and the last was for $1,000. All of the checks have been deposited successfully and cleared. During the summer, Werner also negotiated the $10,000 debt from F&H to a more manageable $3,700. He said F&H Director Mark Ditman allowed Brown to use unspent ambiance and matching fund money from the previous year to help pay off the debt. Since then, Werner said changes have been made in the way Brown's finances are handled. They moved the Brown bank account from the International Bank of Commerce to Chase Manhattan Bank, where most Rice organizations bank, because IBC cashed checks with improper signatures and allowed Brown to accumulate a large negative balance. Another change is that outgoing treasurers must make a statement of the budget to the incoming treasurer, the masters and the college coordinator. Czarnota said Brown is now financially stable. She said that their audit discovered quite a few checks that had never been cashed, which allowed them to add almost $8,000 to the budget. Also, Nunez's $7,000 has left them better off than they have been in recent memory. Pope declined to comment but submitted a written statement. "As the master of Brown College, I'm an advocate for all students," he said. "Everyone makes mistakes and as long as they make amends, I will not hold it against them."
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