Jasper County Democrat, Volume 12, Number 83, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 January 1910 — DO NOT CONDEMN WITHOUT TRIAL. [ARTICLE]

DO NOT CONDEMN WITHOUT TRIAL.

The Non-Partisan Public Accounting ing Law May Prove a Good •Thing. The Democrat is not assailing nor defending the ,new accounting law passed by the last legislature, it has not been tried long- enough yet t<x determine whether it is a good measure a bad one. The expense of its introduction must necessarily •be considerable, but after once in vogue much of the expense that we now hear so much about could, and no doubt would, be dispensed with. Jasper county has paid out £-great many thousands of dollars to experts in the past ten years that might possibly have been saved had we havp had some such law as this public saccountdng law, and only recently paid |1,900 to learn that an ex-treasurer was short sqme five thousand dollars when he went out of office, which had already been discovered and paid. Only' two or three years ago Rensselaer paid out some 1700 to experts to examine the accounts -of the city officers, and they found about |3O was owing the city from one of the officers, due to a clerical error. Here is |2,600 paid out of the city and county treasuries in a brief time for "investigation®,” enough to pay two examiners under the -new accounting law for 130 days’ work! And then none of the township officers were examined. As previously stated by The Democrat, however, this measure is not a partisan measure. It originated in Indianapolis with the Indianapolis Business Men’s Association, born of the rottenness unearthed In the county offices there—under republican control though they were—and was presented in the Senate by Senator Bland, a republican, who was its author. It was not a House measure as charged by the Rensselaer Republican, but was known as Senate Bill No. 2,

and is so designated in the Acts of the last General Assembly, in the title—see Acts, page* 136. The Senate stood 27 republicans to 23 Democrats, and when the bill was passed in the Senate on Feb. 10, (see Senate Journal page 544545) every republican, including Senator Halleck, voted for it and 22 democrats against it, the vote being 27 to 22. , Feb. 20 the bill passed the House by a vote of 76 to 8, Sicks, democrat, and 7 of the 39 republican members of the House voting against. (See House Journal.) The House stood 59 democrats to 39 It will thus be seen that any attempt to make political capital out of the passage of the law is exceedingly silly. W. H. Blodgett in the Indianapolis News says in a long article favoring the law: • “When a howl against the field examiners and the state accounting board is sent up from any particular locality ‘it’s dollars to doughnuts’ that an investigation in that locality will be a good thing for the taxpayers.”