Student Resources employees and Tufts Community Union (TCU) senators have identified financial anomalies indicating that recently-fired Director of Student Activities Jodie Nealley embezzled from their accounts.
These revelations come as student organizations scramble to review their finances and members of the community consider new questions about oversight.
"The overall picture is there are situations that need to be shored up, procedures [and] policies that need to be addressed for change," Dean of Student Affairs Bruce Reitman said. "Because it seems to me like a back door was left open."
The Audit and Management Advisory Services (AMAS) Office is still piecing together the puzzle surrounding the $300,000 that Nealley allegedly stole, but junior and Tufts Student Resources (TSR) Co-President Mike Meucci believes that some came from his organization.
Nealley served as a volunteer on TSR's board of directors, and Meucci said that she recently suggested two policies that increased her control over the student-run group's finances.
The group, which operates the Rez in the campus center and oversees laundry and MicroFridge services, incurred an unexpected deficit last year, and some suspected it was because its employees occasionally forgot to deposit checks at the bursar's office. The money for these checks was taken out of TSR's Bank of America account and was supposed to be deposited in an on-campus account to be used to pay student workers.
Nealley suggested simplifying the process by having group members give the checks directly to her. TSR employees began doing so this summer.
"It seemed like a good system," Meucci said. "It really gave us [the] opportunity to streamline our operations."
But in hindsight, the move gave Nealley too much access to TSR's money.
"Potentially, the funds that we gave her were not all deposited into our student account, or she overstated the amount that we owed," Meucci said.
Nealley also suggested that TSR workers at the Rez give their cash revenue to her office so she could deposit it in a safe.
Her idea came after some cash disappeared from the Rez last spring. While the money was later found, the incident left the café's employees looking for a safer storage option, which Nealley's proposal appeared to offer.
Both of these policy changes were approved by TSR's board of directors, and Meucci said they did not raise any suspicions because the group had faith in Nealley.
"Part of the problem we had is we trusted Jodie too much," he said. "When I found this out, it was like being hit with a ton of bricks."
Meanwhile, the Senate has also identified bookkeeping issues that are traceable to Nealley and may be proof of embezzlement.
"There were some suspicious deposits and also some suspicious withdrawals ... over a number of months," TCU President Neil DiBiase said.
TCU Treasurer Evan Dreifuss said Nealley's withdrawals were out of the ordinary because while they were taken from an account used to pay individuals or companies on behalf of student groups, no groups were charged.
Before allegations publicly emerged about Nealley, Dreifuss approached her about the withdrawals. Nealley then deposited money in the account and told Dreifuss it was a transfer. It is still unclear whether the deposit was more, less or the same as the amount withdrawn.
"We're still trying to figure it out," Dreifuss said. "Things aren't clear at all."
It appears that Nealley exploited a lack of oversight and a power vacuum to embezzle funds from the two groups.
Much of what Nealley did was supervised by Reitman, but her involvement with TSR was voluntary and fell outside of his jurisdiction.
"[There are] a number of associations that Jodie had, some of which were in her line of report within Student Affairs and some of which were either independent of that, or possibly activities that she was involved in that no one was aware of," Reitman said. "I think overall, while some of Jodie's work was very connected with situations that were under total control, clearly there were some that were not."
As for her role in the Senate, it seems that Nealley took advantage of a temporary vacuum caused when Budget and Fiscal Coordinator Ray Rodriguez left this summer.
This is the position that has the most contact with Senate funds, and Nealley had control over it for several weeks until current officeholder Diane Fay stepped in.
"Jodie had a lot more oversight in financial matters than she should have," DiBiase said. "I think in the future we will ensure that even in transition times there are interim checks in place."
Nealley served as the Senate's advisor and played a key role in TSR activities. Both organizations relied on her office to provide oversight of students with access to large sums of money.
"Bookkeeping has always been one of our weaknesses," Meucci said, noting that keeping accurate records is difficult when student turnover is high. As such, he relied on Nealley to help provide leadership.
Meucci said that he has faith in TSR employees, but since temptation is always present when working with funds, he felt that trusting Nealley made sense.
"It's kind of a catch-22 ... because when the cash went missing from the Rez, we initially thought that one of the [student employees] took it," he said. "On the flip side, we have events like this come up."
DiBiase identified a similar trend in the Senate.
"In student leadership, there's such high turnover that you do place a lot of faith in professionals to oversee operations, and that's what enabled Jodie to do what she did," he said.
Still, he feels that this trust is, on balance, good to have.
"Tufts puts a lot of faith in students, and in turn, students put a lot of faith in Tufts employees," he said. "And I think it would be wrong to jeopardize a lot of that trust and goodwill because of one person."
Moving forward, university officials will work to identify the exact sources from which Nealley embezzled. Meucci said that his group is helping with this, as employees have records of all the checks they gave to Nealley. But it may be more difficult to determine if cash was taken from the Rez, as there is less of a paper trail.
Nealley controlled a number of other cash-based operations as well, which is one reason why it will be difficult to trace her exact patterns.
Reitman has promised that all student groups affected by Nealley's embezzlement will be reimbursed, but he acknowledged that it may be impossible to identify every misappropriation.
"Will some if it be a best approximation? Maybe. What I'm confident of is that all organizations that reasonably seemed to be impacted by this will be made whole," he said.
Officials are also working to formulate specific policy responses. Director of Conferences and Summer Programming Paul Tringale, for example, said he will cooperate with the AMAS Office to examine financial protocols in his new role as interim director of student activities.
"But it is rather premature for any of us to offer specific recommendations," he said in an e-mail.
DiBiase will also help review policies, but said that ultimately, students have to rely on the system already in existence to discover abuses.
"We can obviously put safeguards in place, but at the end of the day, anyone - student or employee - can [manipulate the rules]," he said. "But the silver lining is that Tufts has procedures in place that caught this."
