Beef Checkoff Charges NCBA with Improver Expenses

Statement by Robert Fountain, Jr., cow-calf producer, Adrian, GA, and Cattlemen’s Beef Board secretary-treasurer:

“An independent accounting firm tested charges from the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA) to the beef checkoff in five areas and found many expenses that were either improperly charged to the checkoff or insufficiently documented.

“For example, international and domestic travel expenses for the spouses of staff and volunteer leadership, consulting fees for the purpose of investigating a certified beef program for the policy division, travel performed for the purpose of initiating an NCBA-member insurance program and time spent by employees in meetings related to non-checkoff revenue development were charged in full or in part to the checkoff.

“The exceptions noted by the CPA firm included all three periods tested, but were more prevalent in FY 2009 and the first five months of FY 2010.

“These findings are extremely troubling to the Cattlemen’s Beef Board (CBB) Executive Committee. For this reason, CBB will begin a more comprehensive compliance review of NCBA for FY 2009 and FY 2010.

“CBB will also implement new monthly review procedures of NCBA’s checkoff expenditures and will issue more detailed guidelines to all contractors. The objectives of the additional testing will be to gain a better understanding of the CPA firm’s findings, to determine the pervasiveness of the reported issues, and to calculate the monetary impact of those issues on the amounts billed by NCBA to CBB and the Federation.

“We found these discrepancies through the strong and vital systems CBB has in place for monitoring contractor expenses to assure producer dollars are used appropriately. While the compliance review findings are troubling, the project managers with all of our contractors do excellent work using checkoff dollars and we think every producer has benefited from these checkoff-funded activities.”

Source : NCBA