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Campbell finance department wrangled after years of mismanagement
CAMPBELL
When Yianni Tiliakos, Campbell’s finance director, took over the job in July 2017, he inherited a mess.
A year-and-a-half later, Tiliakos has nearly finished reconciling the city’s budget and has re-worked how finances are managed in Campbell.
He knew going in that the city’s books were far from reconciled and that Michael Evanson, the previous finance director, had been under growing pressure from city council to get a handle on the budget before he retired.
What he didn’t know was that before he could even think about the budget, he first had to fix the city’s payroll.
“At that time, we were behind on everything, and there would be mistakes on people’s paychecks essentially every week,” Tiliakos said.
The city already had been in fiscal emergency for nearly a decade when Evanson – who both council President George Levendis and Councilwoman Juanita Rich, D-4th, pressured the mayor to fire for mismanagement in 2017 – began his tenure as finance director in 2012 under then-Mayor William VanSuch.
Before joining the city, Tiliakos worked for six years as a special audit designee for the Auditor of State’s office.
“It was similar to forensic accounting. We looked over unusual situations – fraud, theft, things like that,” Tiliakos said.
He also worked with the office’s Public Integrity Assurance Team, which was specifically tasked with promoting ethical accounting in government institutions.
Tiliakos was hired and offered $60,000 a year, a nearly $17,000 raise over the previous director.
Levendis justified the raise by saying the city needed to offer a competitive wage to attract a qualified candidate.
Since bringing on Tiliakos, council has largely given him wide berth for setting department policy and implementing changes.
Despite his experience, Tiliakos needed help to handle the workload required to turn the finance department around.
After Tom Lazzara, the former city finance clerk, was fired last summer for “inappropriate conduct,” the finance department took on Crystal Crites and Victoria Gutierrez to work as clerk and central cashier, respectively.
But Tiliakos still needed help to handle payroll issues, so the city asked current Clerk of Council Dina Hamilton if she would take on the additional tasks as part of her job duties. She agreed, despite taking no additional pay. Hamilton makes $34,000 a year.
“Honestly with the amount of work they do, they’re more like assistant finance directors,” Tiliakos said. “There’s no way we could be where we’re at without all the work they put in.”
Tiliakos and his team have caught up on reconciling the city’s budget, introduced controls into the payroll system to prevent rampant mistakes and implemented self-imposed guidelines to improve the overall transparency of the department.
Tiliakos said once he’s comfortable with the state of the finance department, he’ll turn his sights to other city departments to ensure their books and operations are in order as well.