Perhaps I should go back and make something clear.

Ruth read my last post and thought I made it sound like the conspiracies in the DaVinci Code. She’s right, it could be read that way. As a rule accountants have to treat financial facts and the patterns as verifiable. Accountants worry and test. Like President Reagan said about the Soviet nuclear treaty, “We will trust but verify.” When doing audit work accountants are always just a little bit suspicious. Like I said, numbers tell several stories all at once. In some sense they are like parables with a surface story and a meaning behind the story. In the right frame of mind, it is possible to see the meaning behind the story being offered. For an auditor, that frame of mind usually means you’re a little bit paranoid. Healthy suspicion is the good friend of the auditor.

That’s why my post yesterday probably reads more like conspiracy than it should. It also means that it is worth listening to my friend and go and head over to a few other parish websites to see what’s going on elsewhere. He was actually a little more specific about who to look at and why than I let on initially, which itself is curious.